Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories Page 14

  “You mean, It snowed and snowed, the whole world over … A candle burned on the table; / A candle burned? If memory serves, I recited it to you the evening we met. You said it warmed your heart.”

  “Look! The flame has formed a halo around us, as if we’re standing on a frosted windowpane that the candle is about to dissolve.”

  “But that doesn’t happen in the poem. Maybe you’re thinking of the movie, which I haven’t seen, but in the poem it’s The blizzard sculptured on the glass / Designs of arrows and whorls. / A candle burned…”

  “I see a drowned girl veiled in white, holding the candle, and a tiara of flowers is coming apart in her flowing hair. We have to go back!”

  “But we’re perfectly safe. The ice is two feet thick.” He began to jump up and down to make his point, rising higher with each jump as if the ice had the spring of a trampoline, and landing harder and harder on his boot heels.

  Beneath them the ice began to shudder. Jets of froth obscured the clarity as if a fuming fissure had opened at the collapsing bottom of the pond. Giant flukes and whorled flame conflated, enmeshed in veils of milky froth. A rumble boiled to a thunderous crescendo, the sound of cracks shooting through ice like jagged lightning through a summer storm. She screamed and turned to run.

  “Wait, wait, don’t move,” he called after her.

  She slipped and went down in a graceful slow motion, then slid back up at hyperspeed and kept running.

  “It’s only a train,” he shouted over the roar.

  Far off, on the other side of the pond, behind a scrim of skeletal trees, the scuffed silver salt-stained train arrowed across a metal trestle.

  “It must be some weird echo,” he yelled. “Not a Doppler effect, but there’s no doubt a scientific name for it that we’d recognize if we were as up on acoustical engineering as we are on Russian poetry.”

  She went down again hard, ungracefully this time, crawled back to her feet, and kept going. To watch her was like seeing, from the perspective of consciousness, someone struggling to run in a dream.

  He caught up to her at the edge of the pond. She stepped onto the bank and when she turned to look back, her face was streaked with tears. It was the first time he’d seen her cry. Her salt tears had pitted the freshwater ice and left a trail. Wasn’t it she who had told him, shortly after they met, that in every relationship there’s always one person who scatters a trail of bread crumbs for the other to follow? He’d written it down in a notebook where he kept quotes he wanted to remember from books he’d read.

  “I’m sorry it upset you,” he said. “I thought you might like walking out on the ice together. It’s so quiet now in winter, the summer buskers and crowds all gone, the band instruments hibernating in their cases, musical shapes like the pavilion muffled in snow, the organ grinder and his neon-green monkey migrating south like the songbirds—it’s too cold for a spider monkey. Just us, walking across a pond as peacefully as if we were walking across the daylight moon.”

  “I saw a dead girl holding a candle and staring up through the ice, and she looked like me,” she said. “She looked like me enough to be me. As if the ice were a mirror.”

  “Well, she wasn’t you. You can’t be both dead and alive any more than you can be in two different places at once.”

  “I can be in two places if I am in two different times.”

  “But you’re here now with me in this time.”

  “Who knows for how long? Someday I may be looking back on being in love, and which me will be more real?”

  “And who said the girl, if there was a girl, was dead? More likely is that she’s only sleeping in a cryogenic state of suspended animation. I’ll go back and wake her with a kiss.”

  “She’s under two feet of ice.”

  “It’s so transparent she’ll feel the impression of warmth on her lips.”

  “I wouldn’t if I were you, she’ll break through the ice and pull you under.”

  “Nonsense,” he said, “I’ll be back in a jiff.”

  He started out across the pond again, retracing the pitted trail of her tears. From way out, he turned to smile and wave, but if she was there at all, he could no longer distinguish her from the background of winter.

  The Story of Mist

  Mist hangs like incense in the trees. Obscured trains uncouple in a dusk that is also obscured, and later, a beacon sweeps across the faces of a crowd gathered at the shoreline, standing knee-deep in mist.

  In a corrugated shed lit by a misty overhead bulb, a welder working late looks up from acetylene, then removes his mask to kiss his wife, who’s brought him a cold beer.

  Smoke smolders through the projection beam as if the old theater is filling with mist; on-screen, gigantic faces gaze out at an audience of shadows.

  He holds her to him with his left arm, extending the blue flame away from them with his right, and she holds the foaming bottle of beer away from them as if it, too, were a torch. When their mouths touch, her breath enters him like mist.

  An endless chain of boxcars slams back together with a sound of rolling thunder, thunder smothered by mist.

  She can see the mist rising from the hairs along his skin, and touches him as carefully as she might draw a straight razor along the length of his body.

  Listen, in the dead of night, high above the mist, steeplejacks are nailing up the new day’s Christ.

  A buoy tolls in the mist like the steeple of a little neighborhood church that has drifted out to sea.

  A freighter, sounding a melancholy horn, hoists the moon, which it’s been towing, from a moonlit slick, and tows it through the mist.

  Happy Ending

  The only one to arrive fashionably late for the Mogul’s little soirée was the last of several rain-soaked bike-delivery kids bringing up Thai takeout. By midnight, the rain had turned into an unexpected, fluorescent snowfall wafting past the windows facing Central Park, and the dozen or so members of the show who’d been invited to the Mogul’s suite at the Carlyle had nearly drunk their way through a case of Dom Pérignon. When no one moved to open the last bottle, the Mogul popped it himself.

  “To the success of EverAfter,” he said. “By the way, that fucking title’s got to go.”

  Everyone raised their flutes and drank.

  “I can order up more bubbly,” the Mogul said, “but it won’t be the same great year.”

  “Man, they’re all great years,” said Nestor, the musical director, and drank to that.

  “Some are decidedly better than others,” the Mogul said. “That’s what you pay for.”

  Nestor bowed, corrected. They’d all witnessed, earlier in the day, what disagreeing with the Mogul could cost.

  *

  The Mogul had flown in from L.A. that morning in his private jet to watch the rehearsal. Wearing smoke-gray aviator glasses as if he had piloted the plane himself, he slipped into the theater unannounced and sat silently smoking in the back row. The cast didn’t need the smell of cigarillo to know he was there. Gil had never seen the actors more jumpy. Even Renee Wilde and Tony Kayne—TK—the romantic leads, both with established careers, appeared nervous. They’d been working on the play for over a year.

  No one called the Mogul “the Mogul” to his face. The nickname wasn’t meant affectionately; it alluded to his reputation for being egotistical and ruthless. But it wasn’t solely his reputation that put the cast on edge. The rehearsal was a make/break audition. If he liked what he saw, the Mogul was set to buy the film option and help bankroll the dramatic production. If EverAfter went on to Broadway, he would buy it outright for a film; and, if that happened, even the writers with their mere 1 percent shares would score.

  “You’ll never have to teach again, Gil,” was how Liam, the director, put it.

  EverAfter was a sequence of three one-act plays, each by a different playwright, and unified by a musical score and by the ensemble of actors. Over the course of the evening the audience watched the players changing identities and aging as
the stories moved from youth to middle age to maturity. Gil had written the first act, “Youth.”

  It was set in a haunted jazz club that back in the Roaring Twenties had been a speakeasy, and told the story of an affair between a coked-up chanteuse named Bea and a young trumpet player named Dex. Bea believed Dex was a reincarnated Bix Beiderbecke and that in their former lives, when they’d been lovers, she’d been responsible in a way she could no longer remember for his mysterious death at twenty-eight. Now, back together in love again, Bea feared their fate would repeat itself.

  “Dick Jokes,” the second act, involved a banjo-picking woman comic touring the Deep South during the Nixon-Kennedy presidential campaign. When “Dick Jokes” ended, the Mogul signaled for a break. He didn’t return for an hour, and this time he sat close to the stage next to Liam, who, besides directing, had conceived of EverAfter and assembled the cast.

  Everyone in the company knew that the third act, “Viste di Mare,” had problems. Jeremy Spada, who’d written it, had disappeared into a Mexican alternative medicine clinic, the rumor was with AIDS-related cancer. The act told the story of a couple trying to save their marriage of twenty years by taking a honeymoon cruise on the Adriatic. It opened in the ship’s lounge during a storm at sea, with the Captain sitting down at the piano and singing “Slow Boat to China.” Sven Nystrom, a noted Shakespearean actor, played the Captain. Halfway through the song, the Mogul interrupted. “Stan,” he said, “hold on a sec.”

  Sven continued to sing until the Mogul stood and raised his voice: “Stan!”

  “It’s Sven,” Sven Nystrom said.

  “You’re doing it like Sinatra,” the Mogul said.

  “Actually, Tony Bennett,” Sven said. “The Captain’s Dutch, but he’s always wanted to be an American crooner. You’ll see that everyone on this cruise is acting out a fantasy.”

  “Try it like he thinks he’s Michael Jackson,” the Mogul said.

  “He’s Dutch. White, retirement age. Why would he want to be something so outlandish as Michael Jackson?” Sven asked.

  “Maybe because the corny-white-lounge-singer shtick’s already been done to death. Here, have him put these on,” the Mogul said, handing his aviator shades up to Sven.

  “Wouldn’t dark glasses be more Stevie Wonder?” Sven asked, taking the glasses and looking to Liam for support, but all Liam said was, “Nestor, take it from the start of ‘China.’”

  Sven sat down at the piano, put on the sunglasses, and resumed singing “Slow Boat to China.” He halfheartedly grabbed his crotch a few times à la “Thriller” but still sounded like Tony Bennett.

  “Stan,” the Mogul called. Sven ignored him and kept crooning.

  “Stan!” the Mogul shouted. “Instead of parked on your heinie, you’re supposed to be all but moonwalking behind that fucking keyboard.”

  “It’s Sven,” Sven said.

  “Sorry,” the Mogul said, “Sven. Do I have that right? Sven, you can deposit those sunglasses on the piano as you leave the stage.”

  “Pardon me?” Sven asked.

  “I have to spell it out? You’re toast, Sven,” the Mogul said.

  Gil was sitting beside Tina Powell, who had written “Dick Jokes.” She pulled him toward her so that her lips were beside his ear. “The Mogul just announced that he’s bankrolling the show. And that he owns us,” she said. “You may never have to teach again.”

  After the rehearsal, Liam waved Gil over. The Mogul wanted to meet him. “I knew I was going to back the play after I saw your first act, Gil,” he said. “Brilliant, spooky stuff. Do you ever write about vampires? The third act totally sucks, though. Can you rewrite it?”

  “It’s not my play,” Gil said.

  “I can hire a script doctor,” the Mogul said, “but I’d rather someone already connected with our project did it. I’m not even sure I know what the fuck it’s supposed to be about. I get the everybody-has-a-fantasy bit, but that’s not doing anything for me. Help me out here, Gil. What’s there to salvage?”

  “The fantasy motif isn’t working for you?” Gil asked.

  “I’m not Disney, for fuck’s sake. You’ve seen the movies I make. There’s got to be something that goes for the throat.”

  “Passion,” Gil said.

  “Passion?” the Mogul repeated. “Go on.”

  “The couple has lost their passion,” Gil said.

  “Gil, that’s brilliant,” the Mogul said. “Fucking love it.”

  “You do? Thanks. I mean it’s a little clichéd but—”

  The Mogul cut him off. “You know, Gil, a secret to success in this business is to understand there’s a fine line between a cliché and a classic, so fine that—not to sound cynical—it’s virtually invisible to most people in the audience. You’re a classy writer, but you don’t let it get in the way of life. Think about a rewrite. Passion. We’ll talk more tonight. I’m giving a little soirée.”

  *

  By the time a second case of champagne arrived, the park trees, ablaze for autumn, were flocked white. Flights of leaves weighted with wet snow gusted through the swirl of flakes as if the park might be stripped bare overnight.

  “The wind sounds like whale songs from up here,” Tina Powell said. She and Gil stood together at a window, looking out and passing a bottle of champagne between them. “When it comes to beautiful illusions, this city still has a few tricks up its sleeves,” Tina said. “Or is that just the booze talking?”

  “Makes you want to be out there walking,” Gil said.

  “Not in these it doesn’t.” Tina lifted her skirt to give him a better look at her slender calves and violet open-toed pumps. “Wish I’d worn boots.”

  “Perfect footwear for a soirée,” Gil said. “You look lovely tonight.”

  “Had I known months ago you only flirt when drunk on overpriced bubbly I might have insisted on Petrossian instead of Papaya King,” Tina said. “Not that those weren’t top New York kosher dogs. When the Mogul makes us rich, we can celebrate. We’ll dress our wieners in beluga and get drunk as skunks.”

  “I’ll admit to being a little buzzed maybe, but not drunk,” Gil said.

  “Too bad. I am, might as well be,” Tina said. “What’s stopping you? Tonight’s a celebration of sorts, no? You’ll never have to teach again. You can retire to a hut in Malibu and write that bloodsucker trilogy you’ve always known you had in you.”

  A bellman refilled the ice buckets, dimmed the lighting, and asked if he should also clear the food.

  “Leave it,” the Mogul said, “people are still nibbling.” The Mogul had been drinking quietly as if brooding, or maybe his own party bored him. He sat beside an ice bucket as one might sit with a teddy bear, alone on a couch behind a coffee table barricaded with takeout cartons. Takeout cartons occupied almost every surface in the room—the tabletops, the desk, the windowsills. Cartons were balanced on top of other cartons still to be opened. The Mogul rose and began to open some of them, jabbing his chopsticks in for a sample and then resealing them.

  “Just dipping your beak?” Tina Powell asked.

  “Don Fanucci in The Godfather,” the Mogul answered. “Best line in the movie.”

  The Mogul explained that when he’d asked for the best Thai delivery in the city, three different restaurants were recommended. They couldn’t all be the best, so to settle the question he’d ordered from all three. But now, with the cartons mixed up, it was impossible to tell what had come from where. He had instructed the front desk to send up the delivery boys because he felt the best part of takeout was the ring at the door followed by the smell of steaming food. You knew the food was never as good as it smelled, but it didn’t matter. The smell, he said, reminded him of the cheap Asian food he’d survived on when, with no prospects, he hitched his way to L.A., city of dreams, where—young, broke, scuffling, literally picking cigarette butts out of the gutter—he’d determined to make his mark or fucking die trying. In those days when he was always hungry, the food had tasted as good as
it smelled.

  The Mogul sat back down beside the ice bucket and refilled his glass.

  Champagne was being popped all over the room. Debates broke out over what were the best carryout places in the city, Queens against Manhattan, until Liam announced that as far as he was concerned the question wasn’t what restaurant was best, but rather, which was most authentic.

  “You can say the same thing about theater,” Liam said.

  TK took that as a cue to tell them all about the time he’d shot a film in Bangkok, and how the food there bore little resemblance to Thai food in New York. He’d especially loved the street food, and never once got sick, at least not from eating. Drink and drugs were another matter. He was partying hard back then. They’d start shooting at six a.m. and he’d clear his head by eating an incendiary curry for breakfast. Lunch was fruit delivered from the great fruit market on Phahonyothin Road: mangoes, young coconuts called ma praw on, and fruits TK had never tasted fresh before—mangosteen, jackfruit, lichee. There were fruits he knew only by their Thai names—lam-yai, longkong—and, speaking of the difference between smell and taste, sometimes a durian, a fruit so putrid-smelling that the hotels posted signs warning it was illegal to bring one inside, yet durians taste like silky custard, like nothing you ever had before. They’d blend them into icy smoothies, and then TK would get a massage from a skinny woman who spoke no English but could cure a hangover by walking her fingers down his spine. He didn’t think you could get authentic Thai in New York, though maybe a durian could be found in the wilds of the Bronx.

  “Just don’t try bringing one into the Carlyle,” Tina said.

  “Are those places that say ‘Thai massage’ authentic?” Renee Wilde asked.

  “I have no idea,” TK said.

  “So, man, how do you ask for happy ending in Thai?” Nestor asked.

  “Try, I want happy ending,” TK said, “not that I am speaking from personal experience.”

  “Is happy ending what I think it is?” Garth wanted to know. He had inherited the Captain’s role now that Sven was toast.

  “Man, everybody knows ‘happy ending,’” Nestor said, his speech noticeably slurred.