Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories Page 11

  He watches her and wonders how, when the village wakes to the familiar greetings of roosters and doves, it would appear to those born here to find her spray-drenched, half bare, waist-deep in the swirl, a stranger among the age-old, bare-breasted nymphs, pouring out their bottomless urns. Her arms are graceful like theirs, and for the moment, her eyes, like theirs, seem fixed upon some mystery only she can see.

  “Look!” a child shouts. “The nymphs have come to life!” A crowd gathers in the square around the fountain. It’s not an apparition of the Virgin, but miraculous enough, and the villagers are ready for their village to have a miracle, too. Let the village below have their saint. Here, where marble has become flesh and blood, it’s time to welcome the return of the ancient deities.

  But the nymphs are in no hurry for a reunion with mankind. They continue to bathe, staring off, detached from mortal life, unconcerned even as the fissured walls collapse and torrents flood the street, tumbling down the thousand steps, a waterfall that sends the men from the village below rushing into their cathedral, and carrying out their incorruptible saint, hoisted above their heads, while they pray aloud in an old dialect they remember but no longer understand—that no one, perhaps not even God, still understands.

  Wash

  In a slip that is the only thing pink about the day, she strains from the décolletage of a third-story window. Rain beats her with an intensity reserved for glass while she reels in the pulley line hand over hand, a shoulder strap down, a breast nearly slipping free as clothespins drop from between her teeth, just before she disappears into white furls, fighting in the sheets as the L streams by with its cargo of eyes.

  All you’ll ever know of her is what you’ve already learned about hanging out wash.

  Vista di Mare

  In Genoa, as she packs to leave, he tells her that he doesn’t want it to end, and she replies that if he really knew what he wanted, she wouldn’t be leaving.

  Alone, he continues on along the coast to Rome, and beyond Rome, to Sicily, with no particular destination in mind. Each day there’s another train schedule to unriddle, another line to stand in, another crowd to wait among. He’s no longer traveling to get somewhere. He’s bought a rail pass and is going places in order to ride the trains, to sit, if he can, in an empty compartment where he’ll slide down a window and let the gust of racing through Italy blow in his face. From a bench in a crowded station while announcements blare, or from a seat in a train whose rocking makes his handwriting look like a stranger’s, he composes a letter to her, as one might write a page in a journal. Back when they first met, they exchanged love letters, which they both have saved. The letters he writes to her now that she’s left him in Italy are about the places they meant to discover together, small towns whose names he’s given up memorizing, descriptions of weather, scenery, the food they’d meant to share. He writes to her each day, and each night in some new cheap hotel room by a train station he throws the letter away.

  And then one day he declares a holiday from letter writing. He doesn’t bother to record sleeping beneath a crucifix for the first time since he was a child visiting his Catholic grandmother. He doesn’t describe the only hotel available—a converted convent—or how at five a.m., when the bells tolled in the steeple beside his narrow window, it sounded as if waiters carrying metal trays of glass dishes were crashing down flights of stairs. He woke, momentarily confused as to where he was, to the scent of incense from what must have been a mass, mixed with the smell of calamari frying in the kitchen. He doesn’t mention how he walked in the rain to the train station past trees that had assumed the same hunched posture as the street musicians who refused to stop playing. He doesn’t tell her that his mind is full of the melodies of what presumably are love songs whose names and lyrics he doesn’t know. A day goes by without his writing down a single word about all he’s seen. That night he has nothing to throw away.

  He declares the next day a holiday as well, and that morning he boards a train without so much as looking at a schedule, and then, at a stop where a field of sunflowers overlooks the sea, he impulsively disembarks. Across the tracks sunflowers border a vista where fishermen in red wooden boats work their nets.

  He sets off hiking to a town carved into the cliff face, along a trail that climbs through olive and lemon groves and steeply terraced vineyards. After she’d left him in Genoa, he had reduced his belongings to what fit in a backpack. He sweats under its straps and imagines this is how it would have felt to tour Europe when he was young. The year he’d graduated from college, he had a girlfriend who wanted to travel together. Her name was Paulette—a wonderful adventurous girl, whose dorm room was decorated with posters of palm-fringed foreign coasts whose bleached-white houses overlooked indigo water. After making love, her idea of pillow talk was planning trips. He wanted to go with her but was afraid it would seem like more of a commitment than he felt ready for, and when an internship in an advertising firm was offered, he took that instead. Paulette joined the Peace Corps and went off to Africa, and he never heard from her again.

  Along a rocky cliff, he stops to watch the gulls soar in the updrafts. He has always tried to remember that through no accomplishment of his own, in this war-torn, exploited, impoverished, unfair world he has enjoyed the relative privilege of being born an American, and now he feels guilty, self-indulgent to regret decisions made in his youth. He’s never regarded himself as a regretter. A line from a philosophy course he took back in college comes to him: Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. He wonders if he’s ever known what he’s most wanted. Then it comes to him with a force like tears that for once at least he does know: he wants this, to be here now, climbing with his belongings on his back; he wants this moment of looking out to sea.

  The town, etched into the mountainside, is terraced like the vineyard. The streets corkscrew in turns of cobbled steps. He wants to stop here where nothing seems out of sight of the sea, but at a café he’s told the only pensione is closed due to a death in the family. The waiter who speaks some English knows of an inexpensive apartment for rent, but doesn’t know if the man would like it. Americans, the waiter says, don’t feel that they’re on holiday unless they have a vista di mare. That’s why the available apartment is so inexpensive.

  “What does it look out on?” he asks.

  “Cipressi,” the waiter says.

  “Non capisco,” he says.

  “Cypress trees.”

  Voyeur of Rain

  Three stories above the alley, Marty steps onto the back porch for a smoke. He’s down to three—morning, afternoon, evening. Clouds smolder above the roofs. The ring of church bells blocks away sounds diffused by the misting drizzle. It’s been overcast for weeks, a time during which Marty has come to feel increasingly indistinct. Across the gangway between apartment buildings, a lightbulb softly illuminates a bathroom window. Someone, also indistinct, has stepped into a shower.

  As Marty watches, the distorted, fragmented reflections on the marbled glass reassemble into momentary glimpses of a woman. She doesn’t know he’s watching. If she did, it would alarm her even though he can see no more than the blurred flesh tone of her back as she turns closer to the pane. It’s an opaque window, as open to the public gaze as the weathered brick wall it’s set in, and yet, on the other side of the glass, the hint of a woman showering makes a bathroom light intimate. Probably there were once plastic curtains, but now it appears the water from her shower must be jetting against the inside of the pane and splashing off a tiled sill. He imagines the steam rising around her as a downpour flattens her hair and rivulets pour down glass, tile, skin, down her legs, puddling at her bare feet before swirling into a gurgling drain.

  If, rather than a misting drizzle, the force of her shower pummeled the city, flooding the gutters and swirling into echoey sewers, Marty wouldn’t be standing out here. Along the streets the blurred shapes of pedestrians like a population of mourners under stately black umbrellas would pass
silently through fuming exhausts and the distorted beams of vaporish headlights. Marty would have cracked opened his back door and, rather than venturing onto the porch, he’d have exhaled the day’s last smoke through the sieve of a rusted screen door studded with droplets. He wouldn’t be aware of the nearness of her nakedness. He’d be a voyeur only of the shape-shifting rain.

  Above the alley, a gray squirrel tightroping along a slick black phone line sends perched starlings skyward. Marty wonders if it’s the same squirrel that has managed through death-defying gymnastics to visit his bedroom windowsill each morning, lured there by the stale peanuts Marty sets out. The peanuts were stale from the start. Marty bought a bag of them from a blind vendor who had been guided by his muzzled pit bull to the steaming grate of a subway. Marty could hear the trains rushing below and feel their vibrations rising through his soles. He dropped loose change into the coffee can stuffed with dollar bills and as he took a bag of peanuts from the vendor’s hand, Marty wasn’t sure whether he’d misheard the man. He didn’t bother to ask, “Pardon?” and simply said, “Thank you,” and walked away, but in a voice scrambled by the updraft of trains, it sounded as if the vendor had said, “God bless, asshole.”

  Perhaps he’d said, “God bless your soul.”

  The nuts were stale and tasted of mold, but rather than pitch them, Marty set two peanuts on his windowsill each evening before going to sleep. In the morning he’d wake to see the squirrel nibbling one of the nuts on the sill. The other nut the squirrel took to bury.

  “Top of the morning to you, little fellow,” Marty would say, his first words of the day—sometimes his only words.

  A couple of nights ago, Marty realized he was out of peanuts. That next morning—actually in the semidark before morning—he was awakened by a voice in a dream whispering, “Awake, asshole.” The words were spoken at the same pitch as the scrape of claws shredding the window screen. At first light, Marty could see the silhouette of what appeared to be a flying squirrel affixed to the screen. Its yellowed rodent teeth were gnawing into Marty’s room. He had never noticed, until he saw the underside of the squirrel clinging to his screen, how closely squirrels resemble rats.

  Instead of buying more nuts to dole out, or finally opening an ancient box of Cracker Jack—the box he had stolen from a burning candy store when he was a child (a fire Marty sometimes wonders if he set), a singed box of Cracker Jack carried with him ever since from place to place—Marty decided the time had come to stop feeding the squirrel. The following night he dreamed that rats had invaded his apartment. They wanted to pick out his eyeballs as if they were nut meats in a broken shell, one eye to eat and one to bury, and all that prevented them from doing so were the tears he wept. He woke in moonlit darkness to a pillow soaked in either sweat or tears. The squirrel was spread-eagled again, furiously scratching and gnawing at the screen. Marty latched the window and pulled the shade. He had enjoyed the fresh breeze at night, and now the small apartment felt even more confining. But Marty has run out of reasons to leave. There’s no longer a pay phone at the subway station that he would walk to in order to call in sick. The pay phones have disappeared overnight and Marty doesn’t have a cell. Even if he did, he can’t remember what number to call.

  Through the marbled glass of the bathroom window aglow three stories above the alley, none of the city is visible: not the squirrel sashaying along a wire, or the birds lifting into smoldering sky, or black roofs shiny with drizzle, or the man standing across the gangway, flicking the meteor of a cigarette over the railing. The woman in the shower has squeezed shampoo into the palm of her hand and works it to a lather in her brunette hair. Her arms, slender and graceful, rise above her head as she massages the shampoo into suds, and then she ducks her head beneath the drumming water. Suds stream down her steaming body. She has turned directly toward him. In a downpour, her cupped hands lather her small breasts.

  Naked

  “You’re going to leave your watch on?” she asks him, as if he’s guilty of an indignity on the order of disrobing down to all but his socks.

  “You’re leaving on your cross?”

  It’s not a question he’d have otherwise asked, especially given the way the cross—gold, delicate, and too tiny to crucify a God larger than an ant—brushes the pale slope of her left breast.

  “If you’re leaving on your Old Spice,” she says.

  “If you’re leaving on your mascara,” he says.

  “If you’re leaving on your road-rash whiskers,” she says.

  “And then there’s your gypsy earrings.”

  “I’ve put them in the wineglass,” she says.

  “But you’ve left the holes in your earlobes behind.”

  “And what about your beeper?” she asks.

  “Long gone.”

  “Not if I can still hear it beeping in my mind, in my sleep, in my…”

  “Fine. I’ll take care of it,” he says, “once you do the same with your concealed weapon.”

  “First take off that wire,” she says.

  “I will if you’ll remove that birthmark.”

  “It’s a tattoo!”

  “A tattoo. Of what?”

  “Dark matter.”

  “Hearts are out of fashion?”

  “And when were you intending to take off that paper yarmulke?” she asks.

  “It’s male pattern baldness,” he says. “My father’s began that way. In certain indoor lighting I’d think he was sprouting a halo.”

  “As long as it isn’t tonsure,” she says.

  “As long as we’re on the subject,” he says, “I’d really appreciate it if you’d remove that sinister, androgynous hand puppet.”

  “You mean ‘ambidextrous,’ right? Because if there’s one thing Lil’ Martin is not, it’s ‘androgynous.’ And if Lil’ Martin goes, you have to lose the parrot. I don’t care how sensitive, needy, jealous, and neurotic, not to mention obscene, it can get.”

  “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! You piece of shit vindictive bitch!”

  “See what I mean?” she says.

  “Well, so long as we’re on the subject, sweetheart, I’ve been meaning to mention that I didn’t appreciate it when your mother asked if I’d ever trained as a ventriloquist.”

  “She was merely making conversation.”

  “And darling, I wasn’t going to bring this up either, but since we’re being candid there’re the hair extensions, and the nail extensions, the braces, the Liz Taylor violet contacts, the disconcerting shadow of—”

  She interrupts, “And I wasn’t going to bring up the full Groucho, but please, please, please,” she pleads, “even if I laughed at first, it’s not funny anymore, especially when you pick me up at the airport or we go out to dinner or a party. Darling, I swear I’ll strip off anything and everything to get intimate beyond your wildest fantasies if you’ll just remove that ludicrous Groucho.”

  “My love, what Groucho?”

  Tea Ceremony

  The tentative first snow has become a ticking sleet that despite its bone-chill looks molten in the streetlights. Their shoes—his high-tops, her purple suede boots—are soaked from the quest he’s led them on, up one slushy block and down another, since they were asked to leave the movie theater.

  “Are we lost yet?” Gwen asks.

  “Nothing looks the same in the snow. I swear there’s this neat coffeehouse with a woodstove around here,” Rick says. “I found it by smell last time.”

  “If it’s someplace you used to go with Hailey, let’s forget it. Being there would feel creepy to me,” Gwen says.

  “You think I’d drag us around freezing because I’m looking for a place I’d been to with someone else?”

  “You’re right, you wouldn’t want to violate the sacred memory.”

  “Jeez, you’re in a shitty mood. If you think it’s my fault getting us kicked out, I apologize.”

  “I was in a great mood. What’s more romantic than getting eighty-sixed for public lewdness and s
tepping into the first snow of the year? I loved walking in it together. Who drew a snow heart on the window of a car, and who walked away before we could write in our initials?”

  “Sorry, I was freezing. I’m not dressed for this. I need to keep moving,” Rick says. “Look, there’s something open. We’re saved.”

  The restaurant’s windows are steamed opaque. Inside, an illegible sign diffuses pink neon across the slick plate-glass window and the Formica counter. There’s a scorched, greasy griddle smell. The few customers at the counter, all men, eat with their coats on. Beyond the counter are four empty Formica tables.

  “I want to go on record that I have never been in this place before,” Rick says. “Nor will I ever be in this place again with anyone but you.”

  “You say that now.”

  “I’d never be able to find this place again if I wanted to.”

  “How about by smell?”

  They sit at the table farthest from the counter and wedge their chairs together to study the plastic menu. Gwen opens her Goodwill fur coat and Rick unbuttons his Levi’s jacket, but like the people at the counter, they keep their coats on. An overweight waitress in a food-stained white uniform, her face ruddy with broken capillaries, shuffles over on swollen legs to take their order. The waitress waits, regarding them through eyes outlined in tarry mascara. Sandra is stitched in red on her uniform above the droop of her considerable bosom.

  “You kids need more time?”

  “I think I’ll have hot tea instead of coffee,” Gwen tells Rick. “Can I just get a tea?” she asks the waitress.

  “Sure can, hon,” Sandra says.