Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories Page 15

  “I don’t,” Renee said. “Is it animal, vegetable, or mineral?”

  “All of the above,” Nestor said. “Imagine, instead of an actor, Garth’s something real: a teamster driving a sixteen-wheeler down I-80 through the night in Nebraska, listening to Jesus radio, popping NoDoz, his back killing him, and suddenly there’s a pink neon sign—not THAI MASSAGE. Just RUB DOWN. Five minutes later he’s naked, blissed, as this pretty Asian woman slathers on oil and walks her magic fingers down his spine. And just as he’s thinking it’s over too soon, she asks, Want happy ending? That’s not the moment to blurt: Miss, is happy ending what I think it is? Is it authentic happy ending? You say, Oh, yeah! And she says, Happy ending, fifty dollar extra. And man, there in the darkness of Nebraska you’ve learned the authentic price of happiness.”

  “I was going to suggest changing EverAfter to Happy Ending,” Renee Wilde said, “but now I’m afraid that would raise the wrong expectations in the audience.”

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if life were that simple?” the Mogul asked. “If expectations were always fair and easily met? If all it took to find happiness was to know the right words for asking, and who to ask, and the going rate? Doesn’t everyone want to know the magic words, and there’s no shortage of religions, philosophies, gurus, psychologists, politicians all claiming to be able to tell us. Take Nixon and JFK in Tina’s play: Nixon’s telling America, Here’s my idea of happy ending, and Kennedy is saying, Well, here’s mine. Of course Tricky Dicky with his grizzled face was one morose-looking dude, and Jack Kennedy you knew was getting happy ending eight nights a week, so, bring on Camelot.

  “Look at the talent in this one hotel room, the plays, films, music, books you people have produced. Isn’t authentic Art—capital A—supposed to show us how to live happily ever after? I once went to a famous therapist, I won’t drop his name or sticker-shock you with how much he thought his time was worth, and I told him: I’ve got everything a man could want—power, fame, fortune—I could go through ten reincarnations and not spend what I’ve made in this one lifetime. I’ve got a mansion in Santa Monica, a chateau in Provence, my own Pacific island, the best food and liquor, women JFK would have singing ‘Happy Birthday, Mr. President’ for him every day of the year. I can feel the envy when I enter a room, yet I’m not happy. First thing the shrink advises me to do is read this novel he thought would help me. I say, Doc, I know the author, I brought him to Hollywood and like most Artists, capital A, he was one of the most miserable fucks on the planet. I’m supposed to learn something about happiness from him? So the shrink immediately retreats to plan B, his Socratic fucking question: How do you define happiness? Like I’m going to pay in time and money to play semantic games, just so he doesn’t have to admit he doesn’t have a clue. And here I am, tonight, surrounded by artists, intellectuals, the New York literati—can any of you come up with a better answer?”

  In the quiet, it was possible for the first time in the evening to hear the classical guitar music that had been playing in the background.

  “Liam,” the Mogul said, “you put this whole show together. Do you have an answer? Renee, you’re a glamorous, award-winning actress, how about you? TK, you’ve traveled the world. Tina, you’re witty enough to do stand-up comedy on TV. Gil, we haven’t had a chance to talk about passion yet, but you’re a hell of a writer. Anybody?”

  The guests had formed a semicircle around the couch where the Mogul sat alone with his ice bucket. They looked down into their wine flutes, avoiding eye contact, sipping meditatively as if mulling over his question, drinking as if that disguised the embarrassing lack of response.

  “I might,” Gil said.

  “And here I thought you of all people would shy away from the subject,” the Mogul said. “Because, you know, happiness like passion can be a little clichéd. Let’s hear it. An answer could be worth the proverbial king’s ransom.”

  “I can’t tell you why you’re unhappy,” Gil said, “because you aren’t.”

  “Oh, I guarantee you that I am. I could produce some very famous people willing to serve as witnesses.”

  “It’s not a matter of what others say, is it?”

  “Well, if it’s simply my word against yours, who do you think the jury will believe? Frankly, I’m going to be very disappointed if you’re leading up to some semantic what-is-happiness bullshit, because I’m talking naked, Gil. Gut level.”

  “Gut level, absolutely,” Gil said. “What if I can prove you are happy?”

  Behind the carton-stacked coffee table, the Mogul leaned forward on the couch as if not wanting to miss a word.

  “I went to college on a track scholarship,” Gil said.

  “And you look like you’ve stayed in shape,” the Mogul said.

  “Thanks,” Gil said. “My event was high hurdles. I put a lot of practice into making my move out of the starting blocks explosive. When you see hurdlers racing, knocking down hurdles, it can look like a free-for-all, but it’s actually a very controlled event. Every hurdler has the same number of strides between hurdles—usually three. That’s about the distance between you and me. If you weren’t expecting it, and why should you be, I could cross the room, hurdle the table, and before you could react jam these chopsticks in your eyes. And after you finished howling, and your long hospital stay was over and you were learning to feel your way with a white cane, you’d think back to tonight with the snow and the champagne and the smell of takeout that cooks sweating over spattering woks had ladled into cartons for a kid who probably can’t speak English to bring us on his bike in the driving rain, and I bet you’d realize that you were happy. You just can’t see it at this moment.”

  Except for Nestor’s snoring, the room had gone dead silent. No one moved or spoke. The music had stopped.

  “So, when do you say, ‘Hey, just kidding’?” the Mogul finally asked.

  The question released the tension in the room enough for Liam to rise—a little unsteadily—and say it was a great night but it was late and there was a rehearsal tomorrow, and grab his coat from the rack set up by the door. A mass exit of guests followed him out into the hall, grabbing their coats without pausing to put them on, and packed into the elevators.

  The Mogul stayed on the couch.

  Gil rode down in the elevator with Tina.

  “I didn’t know you ran track,” she said.

  “Artistic license, capital A,” Gil said. “Third place in the state finals in high school was as far as I got.”

  “Where’d the chopsticks come from?”

  “You know, until he said ‘gut level’ I was actually going to tell a story about a Chinese poet friend of mine who studied kung fu for thirty years at a dojo called the Sanctuary of Universal Peace. When he told me the dojo’s name, I asked if he’d ever used kung fu to defend himself, and he said that wasn’t why he studied. ‘So, what are you after?’ I asked, and he thought awhile, like he’d never considered it, then said: ‘To be able to say thank you every minute.’”

  “And ‘thank you every minute’ turned into chopsticks. Inspiration will do that,” Tina said.

  They stood beneath the hotel’s gold-lit marquee while, over the wet hiss of traffic along Madison Avenue, the doorman whistled for cabs. When the wind gusted, snowflakes caught in Tina’s hair and melted glittering in the marquee lights. She did look lovely. From the little she’d mentioned about her personal life—a runaway daughter now living at a drug rehab center, an ongoing divorce from a man she described as “a decent guy who still adores me”—Gil knew she was going through a difficult time. He wondered how she was managing to work as well as she was. He had told her at Papaya King, months ago, that her piece, “Dick Jokes,” and Nestor’s musical score were the only really solid things about EverAfter.

  “When I get home, just before I pass out, I’m going to think about tonight and laugh myself to sleep,” Tina said. “Hopefully it will keep off the spins.”

  “Don’t forget to picture Sven doing the crotch-grab wh
ile singing ‘Slow Boat to China,’” Gil said.

  “That’s too ha-ha sad,” Tina said. “But then, maybe he’ll have the final revenge after he incorporates some crotch work to rave reviews the next time he plays Lear.”

  A cab pulled up. “I won’t bother to ask if you want to share a ride,” she said.

  “I’m going to walk in the park.”

  She kissed him good night lightly on the cheek and he closed the door of the cab after her and stood watching her pull away. The cab started and stopped. Tina rolled down the window. “Gil, one more thing. If I were you, I wouldn’t be planning to give up my teaching job just yet.”

  She gave a wave and he waved back.

  The cab started and stopped again. Tina rolled down the window. “One more one more thing,” she called. “If you want to say it every minute, you have to start with one minute. Thank you.”

  Fiction

  Through a rift in the mist, a moon the shade of water-stained silk. A night to begin, to begin again. Someone whistling a tune impossible to find on a piano, an elusive melody that resides, perhaps, in the spaces between the keys where there once seemed to be only silence. He wants to tell her a story without telling a story. One in which the silence between words is necessary in order to make audible the faint whistle of her breath as he enters her.

  Or rather than a sound, or even the absence of sound, the story might at first be no more than a scent: a measure of the time spent folded in a cedar drawer that’s detectable on a silk camisole. For illumination, other than the moonlight (now momentarily clouded), it’s lit by the flicker of an almond candle against a bureau mirror that imprisons light as a jewel does a flame.

  The amber pendant she wears tonight, for instance, a gem he’s begun to suspect has not yet fossilized into form. It’s still flowing, imperceptibly, like a bead of clover honey between the cleft of her breasts. Each night it changes shape—one night an ellipse, on another a tear, or a globe, lunette or gibbous, as if it moved through phases like an amber moon. Each morning it has captured something new—moss, lichen, pine needles. On one morning he notices a wasp, no doubt extinct, from the time before the invention of language, preserved in such perfect detail that it looks dangerous, still able to sting. On another morning the faint hum of a trapped bee, and on another, a glint of prehistoric sun along a captured mayfly’s wings. Where she grazes down his body and her honey-colored hair and the dangling pendant brush across his skin, he can feel the warmth of sunlight trapped in amber. Or is that simply body heat?

  The story could have begun with the faint hum of a bee. Is something so arbitrary as a beginning even required? He wants to tell her a story without a beginning, a story that goes through phases like a moon, the telling of which requires the proper spacing of a night sky between each phase.

  Imagine the words strung out across the darkness, and the silent spaces between them as the emptiness that binds a snowfall together, or turns a hundred starlings rising from a wire into a single flock, or countless stars into a constellation. A story of stars, or starlings. A story of falling snow. Of words swept up and bound like whirling leaves. Or, after the leaves have settled, a story of mist.

  What chance did words have beside the distraction of her body? He wanted to go where language couldn’t take him, wanted to listen to her breath break speechless from its cage of parentheses, to travel wordlessly across her skin like that flush that would spread between her nape and breasts. What was that stretch of body called? He wanted a narrative that led to all the places where her body was still undiscovered, unclaimed, unnamed.

  Fiction—“the lie through which we tell the truth,” as Camus famously said—was at once too paradoxical and yet not mysterious enough. A simpler kind of lie was needed, one that didn’t turn back upon itself and violate the very meaning of lying. A lie without dénouement, epiphany, or escape into revelation, a lie that remained elusive. The only lie he needed was the one that would permit them to keep on going as they had.

  It wasn’t the shock of recognition, but the shock of what had become unrecognizable that he now listened for. It wasn’t a suspension of disbelief, but a suspension of common sense that loving her required.

  Might unconnected details be enough, arranged and rearranged in any order? A scent of cedar released by body heat from a water-stained camisole. The grain of the hair she’d shaved from her underarms, detectable against his lips. The fading mark of a pendant impressed on her skin by the weight of his body. (If not a resinous trail left by a bead of amber along her breasts, then it’s her sweat that’s honey.) Another night upon which this might end—might end again, for good this time: someone out on the misty street, whistling a melody impossible to re-create …

  I wanted to tell you a story without telling the story.

  Inland Sea

  Horizon, a clothesline strung between crabapples. The forgotten dress, that far away, bleached invisible by a succession of summer days until a thunderstorm drenches it blue again, as it is now, and despite the distance, the foam of raindrops at its hem sparkles just before the wind lifts it into a wave that breaks against the man framed in a farmhouse doorway.

  Pink Ocean

  I dreamed in negative exposure of a room where night and light sound nothing alike and so are not balanced in opposition. A room expelled from a children’s story because its clock won’t go ticktock and there’s no hat for a cat or a spoon to reflect the moon. The only illumination a levitating dress, a handkerchief bidding farewell from a steamer, the gossamer curtain suspended on the thermal of a hissing radiator.

  Beyond the curtain, a window open on to outer space.

  Beneath stars like those that Dante sees again—a riveder le stelle—when he emerges from the Inferno, she led the blindered horses of childhood from a burning barn and woke to a momentary scent of cigar smoke.

  I’ve heard it defies the conventions of dreams to touch a ghost animal. Yet, when for one last time I was allowed to gather that beautiful contradiction called cat—twelve silky pounds of wildness—into my arms, I didn’t want to let him go. It was only a moment before I awoke from his familiar warmth, so maybe the restriction against touching ghost animals was enforced, only not quickly enough.

  Freud said dreams are wishes. Once, I cut off my mother’s hands.

  Whatever else dreams may be, they’re a kind of recollection. It doesn’t matter that mostly they’re forgotten, vanished like those theoretical elements conceived in a cyclotron whose existence is measured in nanoseconds.

  Whatever else dreams may be, she said, they make for conversation.

  We were trading dreams in a Jeep Cherokee that smelled of hay. Ours were the only cars left in a parking lot that was vanishing in a snowfall. When the neon sign blinked out, the flakes went from pink to white. We’d met for a drink at a restaurant fittingly called, given the snow, the Lodge. It’s been gone for years, but sometimes I’ll still see it when I drive by if I ignore the seedy antique shop in its place. A mutual friend had mentioned to her that I might be of help in suggesting journals to which she could submit her poems. I was teaching “Your Life as Poetry”—not a title I’d chosen—at a community center for seniors. My students all wanted to know what ever became of rhyme. She taught riding to the blind, the friend told me, and lived on a horse farm. I don’t know what I expected—cowboy poetry, greeting-card verse about horses running free? At the very least her poems were the work of a sophisticated reader, written in a current style: free verse in which the poet addressed herself as you. Their subject, besides the you, was abandoned barns—a sequence that explored old barns as photographers do, but the barns in her poems could have only been constructed out of language. Barns the horizon showed through, composed more of slatted light, motes, and cobwebs than from warped siding, their tattered roofs askew beneath the frown of crows; barns like beds unmade by tornadoes, weather vanes still dizzy; washed-up barns, driftwood gray, flotsamed with rusted, mysterious tools; barns shingled in license plates, their on
ly history a progression of dates—different colors, same state: decay. Unhinged doors gaping shadow and must, recurring hints about divorce and childlessness—a few would make it to the pages of literary magazines. Instead of real drinks, we both ordered tea, which at the Lodge was hot water and Lipton’s with a wedge of lemon. And here we were, past midnight, in the front seat of her Jeep, a woolen horse blanket over our laps. I was telling her how I once woke with only a phrase in mind: primary play at binary speed.

  Meaning what? she asked.

  Maybe the motto for the way I’ve lived my life, or should be living it.

  Maybe you dreamed your epitaph, she said.

  Barns in which a conflagration lurked, but where? Not amid the stalls or in the tack room. A faint whiff of cigar, more threatening than an ax. Barns with rooms so secret not even their rodents knew where the keys were hidden.

  *

  In a hidden room, a room expelled from a children’s story, the child who was myself wakes sweaty, needing to pee. A psychopath stalks the flat. His bare feet creak unevenly beneath the heft of the ax on his shoulder as he pads down the long hallway toward my room. Some nights his rolling eyes can see in the dark. On others he gropes along the walls, more terrifying still as he’ll have to find me by touch.

  Three a.m. in the soul. The clock ticks but won’t tock. No rhyme or reason, my mother used to say.

  Meaning what? you ask.

  Meaning my seniors miss more than rhyme’s mnemonic power. In Remembrance of Things Past, Proust remarks that the tyranny of rhyme forces poets into their greatest lines. Senior citizens are pro-tyrant. Rhyme is tactile to them. When absent it seems there’s no other way to get from cat to hat, from spoon to moon.

  From clock, ticktock, to the mad, homemade puppet of a sock named Frère Jacques with the brain of a rock, which could blackjack the psychopath whose fingertips just brushed my face.

  Shhh, it’s only the touch of the curtain rising on the thermal of steam heat, a levitating dress fluttering farewell. Sometimes the inanimate comes alive not to terrify but to console.