Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories Page 12

  “Tea sounds right for the weather,” Rick says. “This may be another first. I don’t think I ever ordered tea in a restaurant.”

  “What about a Chinese restaurant?” Gwen asks.

  “That doesn’t count,” Rick says. “You don’t order. It just comes.”

  “So, two teas?” the waitress asks.

  “Two hot teas.”

  “That it? Nothing to eat?”

  “Crumpets, maybe,” Rick says. “Do you have crumpets?”

  The waitress isn’t amused.

  “Just the tea, please,” Gwen tells her.

  “You got it, hon,” the waitress says, and writes down the order on her pad. “You want cream or lemon?”

  “Lemon,” Gwen says, “I’d love some lemon.”

  “Lemon for me, too,” Rick says.

  The waitress writes it down.

  “How about some honey?” the waitress asks her. “We got these little breakfast honeys for toast I could bring you.”

  “Thank you so much,” Gwen says, smiling at Sandra, “just lemon’s fine.”

  “She an old friend of yours, hon, a long-lost aunt, or maybe a fairy godmother?” Rick asks after the waitress shuffles off.

  “She’s just being nice. She seems lonely. She’s probably the only woman in here most of the time. Maybe I remind her of someone.”

  “Remind her of who?”

  “How should I know? A daughter she never had. Or one she did, a love child who ran away from home and every time the door here opens Sandra thinks it might be her prodigal finally coming back.”

  “That would explain why she doesn’t consider me a worthy escort. You notice the evil eye I was getting.”

  “Maybe she could see I’d been crying. Can you tell?”

  “You look like you just came in from the cold.”

  Gwen polishes a teaspoon with a paper napkin and examines her reflection in the concave finish. “My eyes are puffy,” she says.

  Rick takes the spoon from her, brings it to his lips as if it’s brimming with steaming soup, and sips. “I love the taste of your reflection,” he says, dropping his voice. “I could lick it off mirrors.”

  “A little over the top, but better. You’re making a comeback,” Gwen says, and takes his hand and slides it into the pocket of her fur coat. The strapless bra Rick undid in the movie theater is still balled in the pocket. The pocket has a hole in it and Rick can reach through the pocket and then through the torn lining of the coat to brush his fingers along Gwen’s right breast.

  “Oh-oh,” Rick says, “this is how it started at the movie.”

  “God, I was so close, too,” she says. “I blame it on that old, atmospheric theater and its velvet seats and winking starry sky. Like we’d entered a time machine to get there, the way the movies used to be. I always envied those generations that grew up making out at drive-ins instead of ordering Netflix. I wanted us to come together while Fred and Ginger were dancing.”

  “Foreplay interruptus,” Rick says. “We’re both probably suffering from posttraumatic sex disruption. No wonder you got upset about a heart on a car window.”

  “It wasn’t just a car. It was a vintage Jaguar. That was the point, a beautiful, sleek green Jag inscribed with a heart. Tomorrow morning some lonely venture capitalist is going to come out and find that heart on his car and see only my initials in it ’cause you were freezing and couldn’t wait around. He’ll think it was a message for him and inscribe his initials where yours were supposed to be, and then he’ll slowly cruise through the city, hoping for G loves blank space, whoever she is, to wave as he goes by.”

  Sandra brings a plastic tray to their table. Arranged on the tray are two small metal pots filled with steaming water and two thick white chipped cups on matching chipped saucers. There are two Salada tea packets on a separate plate, two spoons, and a little white bowl of lemon wedges. She carefully transfers each item to their table, setting a cup, pot, and spoon before each of them, and the bowl of lemon wedges in the middle. She opens each tea packet and places a tea bag in each cup and then from her apron pocket produces two small containers of honey.

  “Anything more I can get you?” Sandra asks.

  “This is wonderful,” Gwen says. “I wasn’t expecting a tea ceremony when I ordered.”

  Sandra smiles, pleased. “It’s just tea bags,” she says. “My mother really knew how to brew tea—real loose tea from India in a little silver ball with a chain. She’d read the leaves.”

  “Really!” Gwen says. “I always wanted to see someone do that. My mother told me my Nona Marie used to read the cards. Not tarot, just regular playing cards. The family story is that it was the cards that told my grandmother her future was in America.”

  “I read the cards,” Sandra says. “It’s in my family. All the women can do it. My sister Irene can read eggs. Don’t laugh,” she says to Rick. “It’s true. I read palms.”

  “Who taught you?” Gwen asks. “Or did you just like know how?”

  “My mother taught me. She taught me what I already knew but didn’t have the confidence for. I can show you,” Sandra says, and sits down at their table. She extends her hand toward Gwen, and Gwen releases Rick’s hand in the pocket of her fur coat, and gives her hand to Sandra.

  “It’s amazing what we’re born knowing if someone just shows us,” Gwen says.

  “Yeah, and amazing what we think we know when what we know is nothing,” Sandra says. “You have a warm, lovely hand, hon.” She turns Gwen’s hand palm up and lightly traces the lines with her crooked forefinger, studying them, and then looking up at Gwen, who meets Sandra’s eyes and smiles.

  Sandra doesn’t smile back.

  “You’re laughing on the outside, but your heart is crying,” Sandra says.

  Rick feels caught off guard. He notices Gwen flinch and instinctively draw back, but Sandra grips her wrist. Gwen closes her hand and Sandra gently pries it back open and studies it again. “You two, you’re the wrong chemicals to mix,” she says, and shakes her head disapprovingly.

  “Pardon?” Gwen says.

  “Not a good fit, no balance. Don’t go near the ledge together,” Sandra says, and pushes herself up as if she’s suddenly weary, then shuffles away.

  “Mondo weirdo,” Rick says. “There goes her tip. I think we just experienced the gypsy tea ceremony. That line about crying in your heart sounds like it comes out of Fortune-telling for Dummies.”

  He pours hot water over his tea bag; the water in the cup turns tannic.

  “My great-aunt Lucile used to look like she was reading tea bags,” he tells Gwen. “She’d put hot tea bags on her eyes when she had a migraine. She could tell the future from the spatters of bacon fat, too, and forecast winners at the track from feeling the fuzz on a raspberry.”

  He sips his tea. The water that appeared to be hot is tepid.

  Gwen reaches for the glass container of sugar that huddles together with the salt and pepper shakers, a squeeze bottle of mustard, a bottle of Tobasco, and a clotted bottle of catsup missing its cap around the napkin dispenser, like a little village rising from a Formica plain.

  “Did you and your friends ever fill the sugar container with salt when you were in high school?” Rick asks.

  “What a callow, guy thing to do,” Gwen says. She stops before pouring sugar into her cup, and instead touches the tip of her index finger to the sugar spout and then extends the sugary finger toward Rick. “Taste. Some gang of knuckleheads like your high school homies might have been messing around here.”

  “It’s sweet,” Rick says. He licks the grains from her fingertips, then spreads her middle and forefinger as if spreading her legs and runs his tongue down the side of her forefinger to the webbing and laps her there. She takes his hand, sprinkles sugar on his forefinger, guides it to her lips, and sucks it. He closes his eyes.

  “Did you like it in the movie theater?” Gwen asks.

  “Loved it. I’m sorry we got kicked out into the cold before we found out
if we could get off before Fred at least gets to kiss Ginger.”

  “What if going to that old theater was going back in the past, and because we got kicked out instead of staying until it was over and returning to the present, we were kicked out into the past? I mean, look at this place. Think about outside, how nothing looked the same.” Gwen releases his hand and bobs her tea bag in the cup. The string slips from the staple that attaches the bag to the Salada label, and she spoons the tea bag out and presses it to her eye. “Oooh, that feels good. Great-Aunt Lucile was on to something.” Gwen places the tea bag on her saucer, and then sprinkles sugar on the lemon wedges in the bowl. “I like tart tastes. I used to suck lemons even when I was a little kid. My friends all thought I was crazy. I like how clean they make my mouth feel.” She sucks at a lemon wedge, and then inserts the wedge into her mouth and retracts her lips, giving Rick a lemon-peel smile.

  He peels open a honey container, dabs out a fingertip of honey, outlines her lips, and kisses her. The lemon wedge still in her mouth blocks the probing of his tongue. Her kiss tastes of lemon oil. He dabs his forefinger in the honey again, and then slips his hand beneath the table and carefully slides it between the folds of her fur coat and up under her heather woolen skirt. When he reaches her thighs, her legs part. She looks at him and narrows her eyes. There’s the tink of her spoon as her right hand absently stirs her tea. “So you think maybe we’re like stranded in the past together?” Rick asks. The lemon peel smiles back at him from between her lips. The radiant warmth of her body defies the grains of ice slashing through the dark trees that line the curb, the sleet ticking against the pinkish plate-glass window and pocking the film of snow on the windshields of parked cars. No way would that heart on the Jag survive until morning. She slouches down in her chair, pressing his sticky fingertip against her panties, and then past the elastic so that the honey mixes with her slickness. They may have entered the past, but for this moment there’s only the present between them.

  From behind the counter, Sandra locks them in a nonstop stare.

  With his free hand, Rick raises his teacup to his lips. Gwen’s eyes are closed, she’s breathing heavier, nostrils flared and her lips parted, revealing a silent lemon-yellow sigh. When she slides toward his finger so that it enters, Rick whispers, “We can’t let on we’re from the future. They don’t want our kind here. Sweetheart, you have to at least make like you’re sipping your tea.”

  The Question

  A mime is climbing stairs. He climbs reluctantly, each leaden step an act of resignation, which may explain why, despite his effort, he’s not ascending. He no more wants to reach the top than a man mounting another kind of stage—a platform where an executioner stands waiting with an ax.

  Or perhaps the executioner is seated in a portable director’s chair, puffing through a slit in his hood the cigarette meant for the condemned while stropping the blade of a guillotine that has just failed the cabbage test.

  Or perhaps the stairs lead to a hangman tying a knot with the care that his wife expended just that morning braiding their daughter’s hair.

  The mime climbs and climbs, but cannot conquer the three-step flight that peaks in the space reserved for him in the mercy seat.

  Or perhaps … but wait!

  There’s been an error in interpretation. The mime isn’t climbing. All along he’s been marching in place. Still, from his body language, not to mention the look engraved on his face, it’s clear that misinterpretation is not to be confused with a stay of execution.

  Okay, then the mime is marching—marching down a buzzing, fluorescent corridor in the bowels of a prison, toward a gurney for an operation that requires only an anesthesiologist and a chaplain.

  He is marched at dawn across a deserted square to a send-up of pigeons, and takes his place against the riddled wall that faces an unshaven, disheveled firing squad. Their hungover master of ceremonies, a captain, smelling of women, stands sipping menudo from a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup, sheepishly aware that he has just smoked the cigarette prop. Instead of a sword, the captain raises a blood-red parasol that theatrically pops open. Instead of a sidearm to deliver the coup de grâce, he’s holstered a cell phone that is carrying on its own nonstop, one-way, outraged conversation. As for the blindfold, well, each member of the audience seems to be wearing it. On further inspection, each soldier in the firing squad is wearing one, too. And yet, despite the disordered proceedings, and just before the Ready, aim, etc., command, the captain remembers to ask, “Any last words?”

  Transients Welcome

  Old Man Martin checks into a cheap hotel to die. He winks when the Desk Clerk asks how long he’ll be staying, but the Desk Clerk mistakes that to mean he should send up a woman. The woman doesn’t notice the old man’s haggard expression, his pallor, his jaundiced eyes. What she’s alert to is the man lovingly slipping his belt out of the loops of his trousers or studying her scars with too much fascination.

  “What you here for?” Martin asks, his voice the backside of a cough.

  “Come for sex,” the woman says as if sharing a confidence. She’s not a native speaker.

  “Say what?” Martin yells, as if she’s the one who’s deaf.

  “Come for sex.”

  “Comfort the sick? You a doctor? I don’t want no more doctors.”

  “Pesos, hole,” the woman says, keeping it elementary, gesturing that hole includes her flabby breasts.

  “Soul? What’ll you pay? You the devil?”

  “Hole!” she says, and strips off her maid’s smock.

  Old Martin breaks into a demented grin. “The whole enchilada? Know the price of the whole enchilada? Holy moley!” He collapses on the bed, laughing like a lunatic, chanting, “Holy, holy, holy moley,” and drubbing the mattress with his heels and fists so that the bedsprings squeal like they’re doing it, and the picture of the ghost ship emerging from a fog of dust sails from the nail above the headboard to the floor.

  “You holy, holy loco?” the woman shouts, and throws up her hands.

  “Hole? You the grave digger?” Martin sits up cradling an air guitar. You can dig my grave with a bloody spade, he sings in a rasp befitting of Blind Boy Martin. Oh, Lord, dig my grave with a bloody spade, but just make sure the grave digger gets paid. He fumbles on his specs—one lens is missing, the other’s cracked—and, squinting, fishes a coin from his worn change purse and places it in her outstretched palm. “That why you dressed in mourning?”

  “I’m naked,” she says.

  “You the Dark Angel? Where’s your wings?” Martin grabs her arm and tries to claw the coin back from her clenched fist. “Give it up, you damned imposter,” he’s shouting. “That’s my life’s savings.”

  She tears away, slams out the door leaving her smock behind, and races dizzily down the spiral of back stairs, Holy, holy, holy looping her brain. She can’t say why she’s sobbing. The life’s savings has seared her fist shut so tightly that she can feel the face stamped on the coin. It’s her face, and on the tails side there’s a heart, her heart, wreathed in flames like the Virgin’s heart in holy pictures. Heat scalds through her veins and renders fleshiness down to sinew. Body supple again, scars erased, lacquered with tears and sweat, she busts out of the sheet-metal door, nearly knocking it off its rusted hinges.

  In the alley, men are drinking rotgut between wars. Their rap anthem whines as they debate the day’s pack order of has-beens, coulda-beens, and wannabes. They’ve been one-upping one another’s bullshit tales of conquest as if auditioning for the Poontang Monologues. Whatever her native tongue, she’s had to become fluent in the dialect they speak. They gape as if at an apparition. Before she can whirl back up the stairs, she’s tackled. There’s no confusion here between whole and hole. They want most what she conceals and when she won’t unclench her fist, swearing she can’t, one of them smashes a bottle against the banister, and one opens a straight razor, and another slides a bayonet out of a cowboy boot.

  Her cries echo and dim along twe
nty-watt corridors. Holy, holy, holy. Old Martin starts from his nap. In his dream of fog and dust was the voice praying so fervently his own? He hugs himself in the nest of soiled sheets. The mattress smells of urine, the pillow of hair. He tries whispering a prayer into the megaphone of an empty water glass, and the water glass fogs, as does the dusty window and bureau mirror. He presses the glass to his ear and hears what’s left of his breath awash in a seashell. Out at sea, lost in fog, the ghost ship with its cargo of souls plows toward the lonely ringing of a distant buoy.

  The Bellboy stands on the other side of the door pressing a cell phone to his ear. He’s a Filipino kid whose bleached hair ponytails from beneath a bellhop’s hat. His faded red uniform recalls the hotel’s grander days. He looks as if he just might shout, Call for Philip Morris! Perhaps, beneath his makeup, the Bellboy is older than he appears to be. The Desk Clerk, who has misinterpreted Old Martin’s rejection of the woman, has sent the Bellboy.

  “Ahoy?” Old Martin shouts into the water glass as if it’s a disconnected rotary phone. There’s no dial tone, though the ringing in his ears continues to grow louder.

  “Amor,” the Bellboy answers, and tries the doorknob. Locked. Locked out is the other side of being locked in. The Bellboy has learned that lesson at every reform school that’s reformed him. He’s learned it on Rikers Island, and learned it again here, where working has resembled explicating a trope: the body is a hotel. Transients enter, becoming guests. Until they arrived, the Bellboy was unaware of all his vacancies. He thought there was only one room available. When the deadbeat guests refused to leave, it became obvious there were other, secret rooms. Instead of checking out, the guests moved down a corridor lit by a red EXIT sign and lined with unnumbered rooms that didn’t require keys or maid service; rooms that call for Philip Morris. The closer to the EXIT sign, the smokier and smaller the rooms, until they are too narrow for anything but bedbugs, an ashtray of butts, and a single guest who lies with his arms crossed over his chest, puffing smoke rings through a whistling hole in his throat.

  “Amor,” the Bellboy murmurs, ringed by a smoky fog as if he is swinging a censer, like an altar boy in a surplice of incense. “Amor,” and a voice behind the door answers, “Amen.”