Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories Read online

  The ants streamed past barriers of water and fire, relentlessly consuming everything in their path with their black grinding mandibles, mandibles that could strip a man down to his bones as neatly and savagely as a school of piranhas.

  Rob ran from the ants through the house, pursued by his uncle, who was draped in a blanket that served as the amorphous shape of massing ants. Rob would race around the table with the ants gaining on him, knocking over chairs as they went. He’d gallop up the stairs with the ants at his heels, slam himself into his room, but the weight of the ants would force open the door. He’d jump on his bed with nowhere else to run or hide as the ants oozed over his feet and began to engulf him, while flushed and wild he’d beat at them with a pillow, tussling, wrestling, and finally, overpowered, nearly smothered by them, he’d have to scream, “Leiningen doesn’t die! The ants don’t get him! The ants don’t win!”

  Only then, reminded of the authority of the story, would his uncle sink back, his acne feverish, hands shaking, and silently they’d both return downstairs, which was where Rob’s parents would find them, eating popsicles and watching the ball game, when they returned home.

  *

  Remembering his uncle, Rob had forgotten the ant. There was an obvious bad pun there at which The Woman Who Hates Puns would have groaned. But even had Rob said it aloud, she might not have heard him, for the ant had managed to work its way beneath Rob’s back and, seizing his belt with its mandibles, had lifted him off the ground the merest fraction of a millimeter, balancing Rob so perfectly that neither his head nor heels dragged. And having succeeded in carrying Rob across the boundary of Limbo, back into the ordinary world, the ant now proceeded at a considerably more determined pace.

  They went along like that, hurrying away from his slumbering Love, like a grain of rice from a wedding.

  Ransom

  Once, in college, broke and desperate, I kidnapped myself.

  Ransom notes were sent to all interested parties. Later, I sent hair and fingernail clippings as well.

  They steadfastly insisted on an ear.

  Marvelous Encounters of My Life

  “You’re going to leave your watch on?” she’d asked as if it were an offense on the order of undressing down to all but his socks.

  Had there been a teasing note in her voice?

  Earlier in the evening, at the bar, on their third drink and discussing favorite films, she’d said that she loved Hollywood movies from the thirties and forties for the banter between men and women. Myrna Loy and William Powell in The Thin Man; Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night; Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday; and, of course, Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not, where Bacall delivers her famous zinger: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”

  “The America the women and men in those black-and-white movies staked out between them seems so different from the here and now,” she said, nostalgic for a time and country she never lived in.

  “Different how?” he asked.

  “Well, for starters, they meant something very different by adult entertainment. Movies today star cartoons. The culture’s been totally infantilized.”

  Outside the bar, the thunderstorm that had made catching a cab impossible continued to rumble. Neither of them had an umbrella. His first sight of her face had been through the spattered glass panels of the revolving door she’d entered just before he did—both of them ducking out of the downpour into the hotel bar.

  The bartender wore livery—white jacket, maroon bow tie. Behind the mahogany bar, a two-story slab of cobalt mirror reflected bolts of spring lightning. Three empty barstools away, her reflection sat sipping a flute of champagne. Instead of a beer, he ordered a martini, not a drink he ever drank alone, and between flashes of lightning sneaked glances at her until their eyes met in the mirror. She seemed about to smile before glancing down at the glass she was raising to her lips. It gave him the nerve to try starting a conversation.

  Excuse me, he might say, I couldn’t help noticing that you celebrate rain, too. That had the advantage of being true—he’d always loved the smell of rain—but as an ice-breaker, true or not, it sounded fake and nearly as precious as it would be to recite what he recalled from a poem about rain:

  It’s raining women’s voices as if they’d died even in memory,

  and it’s raining you as well marvellous encounters of my life …

  He didn’t want the rain to let up.

  What if he turned and said: I was just sitting here thinking how I’d be willing to bet that in every life there must be at least one instance when fate came disguised as weather.

  “No umbrella, either?” he asked her. “I wonder if that makes us optimists?”

  “Actually, I left mine on the train coming in,” she said. “The hotel loans them out but I didn’t think to take one. I’m not sure what that makes me. Distracted, maybe.”

  “The train from where?” he asked, rather than “Distracted by what?”

  By last call they’d returned to the subject of umbrellas. She’d begun to touch him lightly, reflexively, as one might to make a point, while recounting the story of how, on her ninth birthday, when she asked her mother for a clear plastic umbrella so that she could watch the raindrops fall, her mother told her, “Clair, dear, you don’t pay enough attention to where you’re going as is, let alone without staring up into the clouds.”

  They were tipsy and laughing as they left the bar, not through the revolving door, but by a side exit that opened onto the hotel lobby.

  And later in her room, maybe what she had actually asked was “Do you always leave your watch on?” That was a completely different kind of question—not banter. That was a question about history.

  The watch was from the thirties, with a Deco rose-gold face and a genuine alligator band complete with a tiny rose-gold buckle. Despite her nostalgia for that era, it obviously had not occurred to her that such a watch could have played a supporting role in one of those movies she loved: Cary Grant might have worn it to check if Katharine Hepburn was running predictably late. It was the kind of vintage watch that people assume must have a family history, otherwise why would one go through the trouble of winding it each morning? He’d been asked more than once if the watch had a sentimental value—if it had been passed down to him from his father or maybe his grandfather. When she asked if he was leaving it on, he considered for a moment telling her that the watch had belonged to his father and was the whole of the inheritance his father had left him.

  That would have been starting off (if this was the start of anything) with a lie, the kind of finagling tale his father was infamous for. His father, a gambler—he referred to himself as a joueur—was a man who, if going to the track was impossible, would settle for bingo. He was still alive, a little demented—or was that just drink—and living in a retirement community outside Vegas. He had visited his father there once and the place struck him as a subdivision gated not to keep the riffraff out, but to keep its population of bookies, hustlers, and scam artists in.

  He had actually bought the watch in a secondhand shop after an acupuncture session with Dr. Wu had left him euphoric. Dr. Wu was treating his spring allergies, allergies he’d inherited from his father along with a tendency to squander money as well as his given name, Julian. Like his father, he went by Jules; neither he nor his father could tolerate “Junior.” Dr. Wu’s office was downtown, and after treatment Jules would find himself at some pricey men’s store buying clothes he didn’t need. Perhaps Dr. Wu, in collusion with local merchants, was inserting a needle in a point that triggered buying sprees. One particularly radiant afternoon, Jules walked through downtown crowds feeling as if the vital force, qi, were emanating from his body. He noticed that women, and men as well, glanced as he passed as if the force were visible to them, too. On Jewelers Row, under the L tracks, he stopped before a window where a watch with a face the color of rose champagne caught his eye. A
n L train reverberated overhead like a drumroll. Until that moment he’d never considered buying a vintage watch, but suddenly he had to have it. When he entered the shop, the immediately attentive saleswoman stared at him in the way that people on the street had stared, while he described the watch in the window. “Yes, sir,” she said, “right away, sir,” and rushed to get it. Not until he saw himself in the mirror on the counter did he realize that Dr. Wu, who only an hour earlier had inserted a four-inch needle in the Baihui point at the top of Jules’s skull—a powerful point where all the yang energy of the body converges—had overlooked removing the needle, which was sticking from the top of his head like an antenna.

  If Clair had noticed his watch in the bar, Jules would have told her how he had come to buy it, much as she had told him about the clear plastic umbrella. But now wasn’t the time to launch into a story.

  “You’re going to leave your watch on?” she asked.

  “You’re leaving on your cross?”

  The Samaritan

  On a humid night when it’s quiet enough after a rain to hear the drainpipes dripping into the alley, a voice—if a moan can be called a voice—passes like vapor through the rain-plugged window screen. It’s only another night noise at first, inseparable from the static that passes for silence in a city—traffic, insects, nighthawks, leaking rain gutters, someone doors away playing a radio or practicing on a cello. But gradually the moan grows more insistent. There’s a rhythm to it that Marty begins to detect, a resonance in its tail of ragged breathing—and out of a half sleep Marty’s eyes open, alert in the dark, and he listens, alarmed.

  Someone is hurt, the victim of a hit-and-run or a rape or a mugging, or someone is sick, or perhaps grieving, expressing each throb of a wound—a muffled, irrepressible cry, the mouthing of a single, aching, mournful vowel. Alarm is his first reaction and his second is a kind of paralysis, as he lies listening, realizing that if someone is hurt, it’s his responsibility to help. He doesn’t want to think of himself as one of those alienated people in cities who will trade off their humanity rather than risk getting involved. He needs to do something, at least to inquire if help is needed—a stranger coming to the aid of a stranger. Or could he be sued for trying to help? Maybe he should simply call 911 and let them handle it. But if he called, what would he tell them? Help, I think I hear someone moaning.

  By now, Marty is totally awake, sweating, staring into the dark, straining to hear every nuance of the sound. It’s a woman’s voice. He’s sure of that. The moans have become steady, there’s almost a singsong about them, and something else—a throatiness that makes each moan more disorientingly familiar than the last, as if he’s gone from a hypnagogic dream directly to a déjà vu. Suppose it’s an auditory hallucination. But the longer Marty strains to listen, the more convinced he becomes that he is hearing the voice of the woman in the apartment one floor down from his, the shy-looking one who wears a Dodgers cap when she jogs—maybe she moved here from L.A.—the girl downstairs who would rather look away than nod hello, even though one day Marty went to the trouble of buying a Cubs hat and timing his trip to the mailbox in the lobby so as to be there when she came jogging in, her hair a little sweaty, her face flushed and more full of life than usual. He’d hoped that maybe the baseball hats would give them something to talk about, but she didn’t notice and jogged past him before he could say, How ’bout them Dodgers, or whatever he was going to say. He’d never rehearsed the exact words, just hoped that at the time he’d say something right, but she didn’t notice him any more than she seems to notice how alone she appears. It’s only the sound of her moaning that carries from her bedroom window a floor below, moaning in a steady chant which she can’t know has disturbed him. Like a voice crying alone in the wilderness, Marty thinks, and yet she’d be mortified to know he’s overheard her. He’ll never tell. It’s a secret he’ll keep safe from a world of predators. Everything’s all right, it’s none of his business, after all, he can simply lie back now, relax, and close his eyes, listening as her breath grows rapid, wilder, rises an octave then plunges to a guttural sigh—a sigh to which, tonight, he tries to time his own moan—before they both drop off to sleep.

  Fantasy

  “Do you fantasize about me?” she asked.

  “Sure,” he said, not volunteering any more information.

  “I have the oddest fantasies about what I’d like to do with you,” she said.

  “Like what, for instance?”

  “I want to shave you.”

  “I want to shave you, too,” he said.

  “Not that way,” she said. “I mean it. I picture you soaking in a steamy tub, a beautiful old claw-footer, and I lather your beard with a boar-bristle brush. I even know where they sell them—at Crabtree and Evelyn. Then you lie back and close your eyes, and with an old-fashioned straight razor that makes the sexiest scraping sound, I give you the best, closest shave you’ll ever have. Shave you clean and smooth and rinse your skin as if I’m your geisha.”

  “Sounds nice,” he said, rather than tell her there was no way in hell she was getting near him with a razor.

  Transaction

  “I wouldn’t mind selling my body if somebody’d offer to buy.”

  “You’re kidding,” George said.

  “Actually, George, it’s not an especially original female fantasy. But besides the fantasy turn-on, there’s something attractively up-front about it. A simple transaction seems honest compared to the bullshit I’ve seen that passes for a quote ‘relationship’ between men and women.”

  George raised his coffee cup and sipped. The pause was a part of a conversation in which he was at a momentary loss for words. From across the green Formica table of their vinyl booth, he eyed Britt skeptically. “How much would you charge?”

  “How much do you have?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what do you mean’? It wasn’t a rhetorical question, George. How much do you have on you?”

  George shrugged, then made a show of checking. He put his ballpoint pen, cell phone, and key ring on the table in order to do a thorough job of searching his pockets. “Thirty-two dollars and thirteen cents, and I have to pay for lunch.”

  “You can put lunch on plastic. Me, it’s cash only.”

  “You wouldn’t take a personal check from someone you know?”

  “George, you’re married. To a lawyer. You’re my supervisor, we shouldn’t even be having lunch, and you’re talking about leaving a paper trail. Cold hard cash.”

  “So, what would thirty-two thirteen buy?”

  “I’m open to negotiation. The ball’s in your court, George.”

  He seemed at a loss for words again, outflanked, clearly surprised, though still capable of sneaking an appraising look at Britt as if she’d been suddenly transformed from a receptionist in a gray pantsuit to a courtesan dressed for evening. She winked and brushed his ankle under the table with the toe of her shoe.

  “You’ve got to get into the spirit of this to take it further, George,” she said, dropping her voice. “My just telling you in plain English what’s possible will cost something. Per word. Sorry if that sounds mercenary, but that’s the culture we live in. The more explicit I am—per word—the more expensive just listening will be, and the less you’ll have to spend on the very things being discussed. If you can’t think of something to ask for, tell me a fantasy. I already told you one of mine.”

  “I never called one of those phonesex numbers or anything like that,” George said. “Some people are naturally verbal. I don’t think I could say anything straight out. How did we even get on this subject?”

  “As I recall, I asked why you always spend lunch with a spy novel, and you explained that spy novels aren’t so much about plot twists as they are about alienation, and from there you started talking about the deception and loneliness of the average daily life.”

  “Exactly right,” George said.

  “And somehow you jumped from
that into how you didn’t understand how loneliness could send a man to a prostitute, as afterward he’d only be lonelier. Frankly, George, that sounds to me like you’ve been entertaining the thought of a little covert action. Here. If you can’t say your secret desires aloud, then write.” She stripped a napkin from the dispenser on the table and pushed it over to him.

  He smiled and shook his head as if surrendering to her comical ingenuity. Instead of writing, he clicked his ballpoint pen and drew a stick figure: round head, two arms and legs, then added a stick erection.

  “Is that drawn to scale?” Britt asked.

  He started again: a new stick figure, this one minus the erection but wearing a top hat.

  “Why not give him a cane, too? What do we have here—you and your shadow strolling down the avenue? Which of those is you, George, and which one is George’s evil twin?”

  “Maybe this is the covert Fred Astaire–me,” George said.

  “I don’t do twins,” she said. “Too kinky. No threesomes. You could have thirty-two thousand dollars and thirteen cents and it wouldn’t be enough for a group rate, George.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting anything of the kind,” George said, then added quietly, “I’d want you to myself.” He crossed out the two stick men on the napkin and drew another. To indicate gender, instead of an erection or a hat, he added antlers.

  “No animals, either,” Britt said. “Or is that a shaman? No shamans. For God’s sake, no wonder you were afraid to say these things aloud. Orgies, gangbangs, bestiality, human sacrifice. We’re talking about a crummy thirty-two dollars and thirteen stinking cents here, George. Unlike love, the art of negotiation takes place at the intersection of realistic expectations.”

  “According to whom?”

  “I think Gandhi said that, George.”