Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories Page 10

  Betty agrees to meet for a drink after work, just not at the bar where the Subs hang out. She chooses the Surfside, a singles bar he knows by reputation, the kind of place he ordinarily avoids. The Surfside is at least a mile from water. It would take a tsunami to hear the crash of surf.

  “Promise you won’t be late,” Betty tells him. “I get nervous sitting in bars alone. Guys don’t leave you in peace.”

  “I don’t suppose they do,” he says.

  Later, Betty will ask if he’s seeing anyone. He’ll say no; she’ll say, me neither. Really? he’ll ask. She’ll say there’d been a discreet fling with a Corvette dealer who played bass in an oldies rock band and was seeing Noreen, a girlfriend of hers who’s a hospice nurse, so it was complicated. Complicated is a word Betty uses whenever she mentions the ’Vette dealer. It means they kept things secret and just when the sex got really hot between them—“our amazing connection, a magical mystery tour,” the ’Vette guy called it—he dumped her without an explanation, at least not one that she believed. She hasn’t been serious about anyone since.

  He keeps checking his watch and tries hailing a cab. Traffic is snarled to a standstill. He could walk faster than he could ride, but then he’d show up looking foolish—liquor on his breath, hair plastered down, his glasses in need of windshield wipers. He’d hoped to make an urbane impression. Instead of having arrived early enough to order a drink for himself and to fold his coat over a barstool so as to save her a seat, and then to sit nervously waiting for her to show, he will be the one who’s late, and the rain is falling harder.

  Later, his first time in her bedroom with its bare white walls, lying beside her in bed, she coaxes him into reciting the profound thoughts he wrote down as poems in high school, something about “Time receding, erasing the past…” And she asks, I wonder what would have happened had we met as kids? Would we have felt the same connection? Probably, he says, but we might have had to delay the sleepover. She laughs and says, I’m trying to reorient myself, I mean, I can still count backward to when we first kissed—only thirteen days ago! You’re an amazing kisser, he says. That’s what you told me that night, she says, and the next day I called to say you were my first thought in the morning, and you called us a work in progress. And now look, we’re supposed to be watching the State of the Union Address and instead we’re in a state of half-undressed with no idea where this country is headed. That could be serious. Serious is fine, he says, just so long as it isn’t complicated. And she says, Thanks for complicating things even more.

  He’s never noticed before how rain simultaneously rains at different speeds: one for the drops beating off the pavement, spattering his shoes and cuffs; another, faster, for rain streaking through the beams of headlights and the streetlights that have just blinked on; and a third speed for the rain chuting from the scalloped edge of the awning.

  Still later, in a conversation he will never forget, in winter, she’ll say, It’s too cold to be walking with your coat open. They’re walking from a bar to the train station, both tipsy. Betty is leaving for a long weekend to visit her friend Noreen and he’s carrying her suitcase—carrying it rather than rolling it because of the dirty slush. He tells her that it’s more trouble than it’s worth to stop to button his coat. He’d have to put the suitcase down in the slush and take off his gloves. And she replies, I’d kneel in the cold street to button your coat.

  The coat on the black window of the bar raises its collar. Just on the other side of the window the tipsy bunch from Subs are rolling dice and saying, “I feel like the bitters in an Orange Blossom.”

  “I feel like the grub at the bottom of a bottle of mescal.”

  “I feel as blue as blue Curaçao.”

  Later, she’ll ask, Remember that first time you joked about undressing down to our concealed weapons? I do, he says. I’m sorry it wasn’t funny—I was so nervous. I’m all in, she says, there’s no more need of protection between us. I want you to have all the pleasure a woman can give.

  Blocks away the new receptionist, Betty—a name whose whispered, soft explosive B his lips have yet to learn—Betty, who tonight wears her hair pinned up ballet-style and looks as if she’s come from a town named Cortina or Palermo but probably hails from somewhere like Peoria or Decatur, is wearing a pink raincoat and red heels. Despite the grass stains that couldn’t be dry-cleaned out, her raincoat, sworn to be discreet, won’t reveal how, at a drunken party, a salt-and-pepper-bearded man in a red-and-black leather Corvette jacket stripped off the raincoat and threw it down beneath their bodies on the wet grass. Betty sits with her legs crossed in a soon-to-be-razed bar called the Surfside. It will be the wrecking ball, not a tsunami, that demolishes it, but at this moment Betty isn’t worried about its fate. She’s impatiently wondering if Max—she doesn’t even know his last name yet—will show and why he’s late after she made him promise to be on time, and although she’s annoyed, when he finally arrives, apologetic, dripping, his hair plastered, his glasses spattered, and tells her, “You’re like the Galliano in a Harvey Wallbanger,” she has to laugh. She removes his glasses and wipes them dry on the hem of her raincoat, a gesture that exposes her thigh. No matter what they’re calling tonight at the Twenty-first, here at the Surfside it’s going to be a Harvey Wallbanger night.

  Later, in early spring, after he sees the first convertible of the year with its top dropped—a candy-apple-red ’Vette with a pink raincoat riding shotgun beside a bearded driver in oldies rock bandanna headwear and dark glasses—he’ll ask Betty, Is there something you should tell me? She’ll act offended and insist there’s nothing and he’ll say, I should tell you, to save us both the embarrassment, that I already know, and Betty will say, Look at my face, look into my eyes, I swear to you. He’ll remember she’s an alias with a mother who is an imposter. He’ll spend a weekend watching her lie. He’ll finally ask, If you don’t love me enough to tell me the truth, at least tell me, do I need to go get tested? And Betty will answer: The truth inhibits me.

  The neon lights, despite their false starts, have flickered on. In the sprayed headlights of stalled traffic, the wet street looks sleek and shiny. He plunges out from under the awning into the procession of bobbing umbrellas, and zigzags through the downpour like a broken-field runner, dodging past those who aren’t late tonight for whatever destiny awaits them.

  Later, just before he puts a few things worth saving—books, photographs, a coat—in storage and buys a ticket out of his life, he’ll translate her phrase, “The truth inhibits me,” into Latin. Probitas me cohibet. A classic phrase like that deserves the gravitas of a dead language, he thinks. It could be cast as a motto on a medallion or a family crest or an epitaph on a gravestone. Maybe there’d be a market for it on a T-shirt. Then he remembers Willis’s question: Have you ever endured a time when something in your life felt as corrosive as the rim of salt on a margarita?

  He’d be better off running in the opposite direction through the three speeds of rain away from the bar, but he’s outdistanced whatever advice or hunches the past or the future might afford him. He’s back in pace with the present as if he’s never left it, as if he’ll never leave it again.

  The coat can barely keep up.

  He breaks free of the crowd, tightropes along the curb avoiding parking meters, hits full stride, gathering momentum to hurdle the flooded gutter, and then launches from the corner of Rush and Walton—a man leaping higher than necessary to clear a puddle, some guy in midair with his coat flying.

  Fedora

  Remove it and there’s sunlight. Terraced vineyards, a grove of olive trees, the netting of an old bridal gown shading the staked tomato plants, the sound of a distant accordion squeezed in time to the swish of the sea.

  Remove it and it’s as if you’ve lifted off the weight of memory. Memory that was once so companionable, and that now has turned into an assassin. Memory with its offended honor, with its vendetta, giving you the evil eye like the godmother of a jilted bride. You work the razor alo
ng your throat while, veiled in dust, the bride stares back from a mirror framed in black like a sympathy card, an antique mirror whose fly spots have become freckles of age, whose spidery cracks and broken capillaries have reassembled into the image of your face juxtaposed upon her face, a mirror whose motto is “J’accuse.”

  Remove it and there’s the tintinnabulation of shells as the sea laps the sand. Crystalline blue water spattered by flying fish. A lemon grove in blossom. And beyond the bees, the sound of a river. And across the river on a distant bank of sunflowers, someone cupping a harmonica.

  But put it on and its brim of shadow extends until there’s barely enough light to see the five steps leading down to the wet street. The moon the backside of a mirror; streetlamps in tulle. And from a black-framed doorway, exactly like the doorway you’ve stepped through, straightening his hat as you straighten yours, an assassin also descends five steps, pausing only to strike and cup a match. In the blue flare, you recognize the face as your face, the same face imprinted on all you’ve come to kill.

  Goodwill

  After considerable deliberation, the woman selects a jade slip from the rack of vintage lingerie. When she disappears into the dressing booth, Gil follows, and attempts to sneak behind the curtain after her.

  “Excuse me! Excuse me, young man,” Madame Proprietor calls, rising up behind her antique cash register and peering over her bifocal lorgnette. Madame has cultured a way of enunciating that expresses profound disapproval—an enunciation that makes shouting unnecessary and yet turns every head in the store. “The peep show is two blocks south on Clark.”

  Gil never sees Bea wearing the jade slip, but he and a triptych of mirrors do get to admire the poses she strikes in a violet feathered boa that Zelda might have Charlestoned wearing. “A must-have,” Gil says, “though it seems to be molting.” A Jackie O pink pillbox hat with what Madame calls a French-netted veil follows the boa. The netting is torn, and when Gil asks if that’s a metaphor for Camelot, Madame answers, “Say what?”

  Next, a pearly Jazz Age dress with a plunging neckline and what Madame refers to as a handkerchief hemline. Madame pairs the dress with a deco tiara for what Gil refers to as a priestess-of-Osiris vibe. There’s an aubergine velvet beret, perfect for an aperitif with Sartre, which, Gil says, is worth the price, despite the spot that looks like pigeon droppings. There’s a sleeveless sequined top whose shimmer transforms Bea into the Blue Angel. When Gil says so, she shows her legs and sings in a German accent, “Falling in love again, never wanted to, what am I to do…” She pauses. “I don’t remember what’s next.”

  “Can’t help it,” Gil tells her.

  “I can’t,” she says. “How about you?”

  “Apparently not.”

  Clothes, Bea once told Gil, can be a kind of diary. She doesn’t keep a journal like he does, but the clothes—going as far back as high school—that jam her closets, hang like chapters of a shape-changing life. Journals tell one kind of truth, and dresses, Bea says, tell another, different story. Bea doesn’t go shopping; she goes “antiquing”: she goes “junking.” Goodwill might be a secondhand shop to some, but for Bea its racks hold fragmented histories waiting to be reanimated.

  A leopard-dyed rabbit-fur jacket completes the ensemble of a tiger-striped satin skirt, alligator pumps, and a wampum necklace that Bea calls her mixed-species look. There’s a crisp white shirt with a raised collar, and when Madame suggests that it’s exactly the shirt that Katharine Hepburn wore with trousers, Gil asks if Hepburn sweated profusely. Despite the underarms, he admits it’s got the look. “Just remember while wearing it,” he says, “not to wave goodbye.”

  Finally, it’s time to bargain with the Madame, who, when the subject is no longer sex but money, raises her voice as if it is the customer who were hard of hearing. Gil has never been good at bargaining, and watches impressed as Bea and Madame go head to head. For a few bucks, Bea purchases an ivory crepe de chine scarf. It would appear she is buying vapor if not for the scarf’s faint threading of wine-colored stripes. As soon as they step outside, she uses it to throttle him.

  In her bedroom, the vapor comes to life, slithering about Bea’s throat and breasts like the serpent seducing Eve.

  “I wish everything I wore could make me feel this light,” she says, then whispers, “It feels like you’re slipping it through my body,” when he draws the scarf between her thighs. Gil blindfolds her with it and demands she guess what’s coming next. The more she’s proved correct, the more boldly explicit her guesses become.

  Bea pairs the scarf with a simple black dress to wear to dinner. The restaurant is called Violet. The small pots of violets on each table are lights. Violet lighting blossoms from the bare brick walls. Its glow tints the mirrors and the blank white sheets of Japanese handmade paper and turns the scarf amethyst. The champagne racing in their flutes is tinted, too.

  “Special occasion?” the waiter inquires.

  “That obvious?” Gil asks, and the waiter smiles.

  “I’ve noticed when you mislead waiters, your penance is always to overtip,” Bea says, after the waiter is gone.

  “Who misled anyone? It is a special occasion.”

  “What occasion is that?”

  “We’ll know once we look back on it,” Gil says. “It’s thanks to our cheap date at Goodwill, not to mention your frugality and hard bargaining, we can afford to celebrate.”

  The store where she bought the scarf was actually named Madame’s, but Bea refers to any secondhand vintage clothing store as Goodwill.

  “Poor you, getting dragged along junking,” she says.

  “It wasn’t so bad. Sort of like entering a time machine. Who knows where we’ll end up next time.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t invite you again.”

  “I promise to behave better.”

  “Sorry, taking you to Goodwill is too dangerous.”

  “Goodwill dangerous? How?”

  “Because despite your disregard for fashionistas, pretentious proprietors, and musty shops, and your barely concealed aversion to the stained, ratty discards of strangers, you’d have me buying everything.”

  Dark Ages

  After midnight, when the only café insists on closing, they follow the corkscrew street that leads like every other street in the village to the Fountain of Nymphs. If they can find the fountain, then, even in this darkness, they can find their hotel, which overlooks the fountain, although their room does not. Through their shuttered window that opens outward into palm fronds, they can hear the fountain all night keeping time with its plashing. Or is it that rather than keeping time, the fountain makes time inconsequential—at least for as long as their money holds out? Each night the echoing cascade lulls them to sleep. By morning, the burble of water is barely audible above the hubbub of foreign voices already going about their business.

  Of course it’s their own voices that are foreign here where they have no business, where they’ve arrived by accident—another in a succession of accidents between them, but, so far, an accident in which no one’s been seriously hurt. Even their laughter sounds foreign and out of place as they hike back from the café. She trails her fingers as if feeling her way along the rugged walls of the stone houses that line the unlit narrow street.

  “Shhh,” they shush each other, and laugh.

  “We have to keep it down,” he says. They stop and kiss hard as if to seal each other’s lips, dizzily lose their balance, and steady themselves against a wall. With her back braced, he draws her hips toward him, and their bodies press together.

  “You’re not following your own advice,” she says.

  “What advice?”

  “To keep it down,” she whispers, and then bursts into tipsy laughter.

  Above cratered cobblestones, the moon is a blank in a starless sky. When the café sign blinks out behind them, he tells her they must have entered the Dark Ages.

  In the entire village, only a single streetlight above the fountain still burns. It
s electricity seems an anachronism; it should be burning beeswax or whale oil or kerosene. Given the glare, they’re probably lucky their room doesn’t face the fountain. In the harsh yellow light, the fountain appears to be crumbling, fissured, eroded by its own gush of water. Each day, workmen patch the cracks and skim leaves and debris off the fountain pool with long-handled nets that look as if they’d be good for catching butterflies. But like a recurring troubled dream, after dark the cracks reappear and leaks spout and puddle the cobblestones so that it looks as if a rainstorm has just swept the square. Tiny tributaries, each with its own current, trace the sloping street down “the thousand steps.” Step by step, water trickles toward the village on the hillside below. Instead of a Fountain of Nymphs, that village is famous for the corpse of its patron saint, which refuses to rot. Given the choice between a village with a Fountain of Nymphs and a village with an incorruptible saint, they chose the fountain.

  With the village shuttered, all sleeping except for the feral cats lapping from the fountain, who’ve now slunk away, she slips her sandals off, hikes her skirt, and wades into the pool. Spray plasters her blouse, she opens the buttons, her wet breasts gleam. He watches her standing with her throat arched back, and he’s glad they’ve come here for however long it lasts.

  “Maybe we needed to feel foreign,” she told him in the café, “to find a place where there’s no way to be anything but strangers.”

  “Have you ever had the feeling that you’ve become a stranger to yourself?” he asked.

  “Could be a step in the right direction,” she told him.

  Last night, he walked barefoot down a cobbled street, wearing a suit, a beautiful suit, no shirt, and carrying a cheap suitcase that clumsily resisted the powerful wind, though his body did not. He was going to the ferry even though he realized that in the distance the glittering ocean was actually the moon-glanced tile roofs of the other mountain village. Still, he proceeded until he gradually woke to her sucking his cock, and far off a dog barking, and they rose and opened the shutters and she braced herself against the sill while he entered her from behind, both of them lost in billowing white curtains, while she repeated, Don’t stop, and he wondered what dream she’d awakened from and if she, too, had lain in the dark thinking that they have to keep fucking because they are afraid of where they might find themselves if they stop.