Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories Page 7

  Midday. He hikes the hill path through the lemon groves. A snake slithering into shadow inscribes in cursive an undecipherable message in the dust. Ravens, gowned for graduation, take flight, and he pauses before the tire track he’d caught them studying, a staff on which white stones are arranged like notes. A melody he’d hum if he could read music.

  Later, in a tiled courtyard called Palm Passage, he sits at a café table, sipping rum mixed with iced espresso. If he still had his father’s penknife, he’d carve his name on the green coconut that has rolled beneath his chair—or, if not his name, then the name he heard them calling while he swung, a name he’s since assumed.

  Instead, he writes a letter. It’s unaddressed. Are letters to no one inescapably written to oneself? To the self yet to be?

  Those questions are how the letter opens. A chameleon skitters over the page and stops to do push-ups. They’re part of the letter. Caught in a sudden updraft, hibiscus blossoms tumble across the tabletop. They’re part of the letter, too, as are the rustling shadows of palms. As is what’s missing—the accents he fails to mark, diacritical marks that should hover above each sentence like birds above a horizon. The language here is inflected even when written down, a language he invented but cannot control. It has assumed a life of its own.

  He’ll weight the page with a tip in foreign coins whose worth he’s still not sure of, and leave what he’s written for the rain to punctuate. The tip is for the young waitress with the sweating pitcher. Each time she leaned over the table to fill his water glass, her breasts, loose in a scooped-neck white dress, were revealed. When she caught him looking away, she smiled, her amused eyes a match for the sea beyond the platinum sand. He suspects that, like him, she’s a stranger here.

  Beyond the bird-flocked horizon, distant thunder grumbles, but in Palm Passage it appears as if there’s already been a tropical downpour. The tiles are puddled where he surreptitiously emptied the water glass that she repeatedly filled. How thirsty he must have seemed. He’s memorized her small nipples, nipples the reddish shade of bricks, and filed them carefully among a short inventory of secret glimpses: the breasts of singing mermaids that flashed like fish scales as he swung over the sea, the blur of the bathing nymphs he ran past in the forest long ago, the shadowy, plum-dark nipples of his step-aunt, who walked the clock-resounding, candlelit corridors in a muslin chemise, murmuring aves. Her hair, shorn in the convent, was growing out.

  How does a woman come to renounce her beauty?

  He remembers thinking, If I were a girl, I’d look up her blowing dress. The thunder rumbles closer, and he remembers the exhilaration of swinging through the rain.

  She brings the letter to his room as if she’s come to deliver it. Sunset/sunrise rays through the louvers. The hazy shadow of the overhead fan makes her white dress appear to whirl slowly.

  She says, “‘It’s raining hibiscus,’” and he’s not sure how to respond. “‘Head full of light and rum,’” she says, “‘beneath the shadows of palms I was feeling ecstatic over nothing.’” She isn’t speaking, but reading aloud, quoting the letter. “‘Eyes blue-green as sea, and nipples—what is the color of sunlight on bricks?’”

  It’s not what he remembers writing, but he doesn’t deny it. It’s what he might have written, what he wanted to write. The language with a life of its own is rewriting the letter, rewriting the story of his life. It’s a landscape of inflection they inhabit, a mercurial trill of echo and shadow, the accents traced along the spine with a fingernail as the words are whispered against an ear. At the eye of a private hurricane, an overhead fan draws her white dress over her head. Oh, Lordy, they begin to swing, a rhythmic momentum passing between them that threatens to fly out of control, and when she kneels, he clutches her hair, divides it into braids, and, in the whirring silence, holds on.

  Between

  guilt and desire, thought and act, déjà and vu, between ampersand and cross, wing and air, all she made possible and all she made impossible, between river and eel, loving and leaving—a life like the exhalation that separates wine and whine—between mute and mime, between the rhyme of night and light, dream and waking from a nap in the afternoon darkness of what could have been a total eclipse but actually was an April thunderstorm, I thought the sound of men lifting long lengths of rain gutter from a pickup truck was a meteor shower rattling against the metal awning over Sun’s Oriental Food Store.

  Arf

  You ever had a boyfriend kissing your booty?

  Girl, I never had no boyfriend who wasn’t kissing my butt.

  No, girl, I mean really kissing it.

  Yeah, well, men are dogs. They want a sniff.

  Kissing it all over.

  Pass me that catsup.

  All over. Like French kissing, you know what I’m saying? I got to spell it out for you, girl?

  You the one bringing it up. At the dinner table.

  I’m just curious to know you ever had a boyfriend like that? And this is coffee break not no dinner, for some of us at least.

  Was a manner of speaking. We at a table. How’s your catsup technique? I hate when it’s a new bottle. One good splat and your food is like road-killed.

  I got to go make a call. See you, girl. Them nasty jumbo fries gonna give you a jumbo booty.

  Toujours pour la première fois

  C’est à peine si je te connais de vue …

  Professor Martino has written on a napkin: Always for the first time, I scarcely know you when I see you. The lines are by a French poet, but, Professor Martino thinks, Cole Porter might have written them. It is Martino’s practice when traveling to a foreign country to bring a book of poems and a dictionary in the language of that place. He sits in an orange plastic booth, drinking black coffee, with still three more hours to kill before a flight to Paris. He allows himself to regress in airports to the diet of a kid—cinnamon buns, caramel corn, soft-serve. He’s eaten the one Big Mac he’ll eat this year, while imagining the bistro food to come—Belon oysters, rabbit with green olives, champagne—and thinking about the woman with whom he hopes to share those meals. They are supposed to meet at a boutique hotel on the river near Saint Germain, and he can’t help worrying whether, even though it’s a hotel she has chosen, she’ll be there. He can’t help wondering, though it is none of his business, what excuse she’s made for the trip to her husband, whom she refers to by profession rather than name—the Frackologist.

  Why stay with him? Professor Martino once asked.

  Why do you think? she asked back, knowing he wouldn’t answer.

  Ma femme à la chevelure de feu de bois

  Aux pensées d’éclairs de chaleur …

  The dictionary has femme as woman or wife; the translation has it as wife: My wife whose hair is a wood fire. Whose thoughts are heat lightning …

  Martin prefers my woman.

  Ma femme aux cils de bâtons d’écriture d’enfant …

  My woman whose eyelashes are strokes of a child’s writing …

  Cole Porter wouldn’t have come up with that.

  The Frackologist is an executive with Halliburton who, she says, drank himself into a coronary before he became a cycling fanatic. He cycles on a recumbent bike before a wide-screen plasma television while watching classic boxing and at the end of his ride is soaked in sweat and panting like a dog.

  My woman with buttocks of a swan’s back

  With buttocks of spring

  And the sex of a gladiola …

  Professor Martino is no longer consulting his French dictionary or writing lines on a napkin as if he is translating from scratch—he’ll do better with the menu in Paris—for now he reads in English: My woman with eyes of water to drink in prisons …

  Panting like a dog, giving me those cocker-spaniel eyes, sniffing around me like a dog in heat are the ways she’s described the Frackologist. And, while Professor Martino has never heard her say men are dogs, when he catches the phrase from the booth behind him, he has an urge to turn, but doesn’
t. He never gets a look at the woman whose boyfriend likes to root around, but after she leaves, Professor Martino hears her friend, the woman with the fries, shake the crushed ice in her cup, take a slurp of her drink, and then whisper aloud, “Whore.”

  Fingerprints

  Down at the 43rd Precinct they know that fingerprints don’t lie. The detectives study the inky orbits their coffee cups stamp on blotters. They’ve seen it all. What’s loneliness compared to Missing Persons? Longing next to grand larceny? Love beside assault with a deadly weapon?

  But even the clerks know that crimes of passion leave clues. Around midnight the report comes down from the boys in the lab: your fingerprints are everywhere—on doorknobs, glasses, mirrors, the shower stall, on the desktop when the lamp is lit, on the silent, cradled telephone, on the sleeping screen, and the keyboard—on each letter of the alphabet—on both sides of windowpanes among old prints of rain. It’s as if you needed to touch everything. Or maybe you were just being careless as usual, expecting, as usual, that we’ll all simply keep letting you go.

  Mole Man

  Her voice in the dark distilled his name down to a vowel until all that was left of it was breath shuddering over her teeth. He slid from her and they lay side by side without speaking.

  “Sweetheart, I love your moans,” he whispered.

  In the stillness of the silenced window fan he listened to her breathing evenly again, and wondered if she’d heard what he’d just told her or if she was already adrift in sleep.

  “That’s good,” she answered, “I’m covered with them.”

  “Covered with moans. That’s nice. Baby, you’re waxing poetic,” he said.

  “Moans?” she asked. “I thought you said moles.”

  “You thought I just told you that I love your moles?”

  “It did sound a little odd,” she said, “but I figured, well, if that’s what he likes about me, fine.”

  “That has to be a first. I bet no one’s used that line on you before?”

  “Is that a rhetorical question?” she asked.

  “I guess. I hope that at least you didn’t imagine I was talking about those little myopic rodents tunneling in the dark through your front lawn even as we speak.”

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart. The front lawn is Astroturf. And of course I thought you were referring to the moles on my skin.”

  “You were probably lying there thinking, dear Lord, there are leg-men and tit-men and booty-men and neck-men—a nation of men in Japan worshipping pinups of Audrey Hepburn’s neck—and hand-men and foot-men, as opposed to a footman, and no doubt shoulder-men and elbow-men and underarm-men and eye-, ear-, and nose-men, but I had to get involved with a mole-man?”

  “Another rhetorical question?”

  “It’s too long to be rhetorical,” he said.

  “Then going back to your shorter rhetorical question about whether it’s a first? For me yes, but I had a friend, Diane, who had a spray of strawberry moles on her stomach that she was self-conscious about. She had a fling with a guy named Hunter, an art student who claimed he could paint dreams. He loved kissing her moles, which she’d only let him do in the dark. One night on hashish she asks what exactly about her moles attracts him, and Hunter tells her he believes that, if connected, her moles will spell out the secret name of her soul mate, or maybe even his still-hidden face. So, stoned, she agrees to let him connect her moles. By the light of a flickering candle he draws lines along her skin. When he’s finished, she winds herself in the sheet and stands before her mirror; he switches on the bed lamp and she opens the sheet. There’s no name, no face. Only lines scribbled across her stomach attached to what looks like random punctuation. She feels utterly foolish. I need to take a shower, she says, but he begs, Please come with me, and drags her into the backyard, him in jockey shorts, her in the sheet. The summer sky is full of stars. He points—There’s Betelgeuse, there’s Rigel. He’s obviously an amateur astronomer. He unwinds her sheet, spreads it on the grass, and she lies naked beneath the Milky Way while he compares the constellations to the moles connected on her stomach. It’s Orion the Hunter, he says. You know the myth? Orion was killed by an arrow shot by Artemis—the Romans called her Diana, the goddess of the hunt, whom Orion adored. Artemis placed his body in the night sky. You’re wearing Orion’s belt of stars.”

  “Sweetheart, that is one weird story. Love is strange. So, what happened to Hunter and Diane?” he asked.

  “They broke up after Diane had a dermabrasion. See, when it comes to loving moles, I don’t think it would be fair to categorize you as a mole-man. The bar for that is set too high.”

  “What category do I fall into?”

  “You’re more of a generalist,” she said. “Moles just happen to be included.”

  “Every last one of them.”

  Bruise

  She came over wearing a man’s white shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, and a faded blue denim jumper that made her eyes appear more blue.

  “Look,” she said, sitting down on the couch and slowly raising the jumper, revealing a bruise high on the outside of her thigh.

  It was summer. Bearded painters in spattered coveralls were painting the outside of the house white. Through the open windows they could hear the painters scraping the old, flaking paint from the siding on one side of the house, and the slap of paint-soaked brushes on the other.

  “These old boards really suck up the paint,” one of the painters would remark from time to time.

  “I’ve always bruised so easily,” she said, lowering her voice as if the painters might hear.

  The bruise looked blue underneath the tan mesh of nylon. It was just off the hip, and above it he could see the lacy band of her panties. It was a hot day, climbing toward ninety, and as he studied the spot that she held her dress up for him to see, it occurred to him that even at this moment, it still might be possible for them to talk in a way that wasn’t charged with secret meanings. Not every day needed to be imprinted on their memories. The direction their lives seemed, uncontrollably, to be taking might be changed, not by some revelation but in the course of an ordinary conversation, by the twist of a wisecrack or a joke, or perhaps by a simple question. He might ask why she was wearing pantyhose on such a hot day. Was it that her legs weren’t tanned yet? He might rise from the couch and ask if she would like a lemonade, and when she said yes, he would go to the kitchen and make it—a real lemonade squeezed from the lemons in his refrigerator, their cold juice stirred with sugar and water, the granulated sugar whispering amid the ice, the ice cubes in a sweating glass pitcher clunking like a temple bell.

  They could sit, sipping from cool glasses and talking about something as uncomplicated as weather, gabbing like painters, not because they lacked for more interesting things to talk about, but because it was summer and hot and she seemed not to have dressed for the heat.

  Instead, when she crossed her legs in a way that hiked her dress higher and moved her body toward him, he touched the bruise with his fingertip, and pressed it more carefully and gently than one might jab at an elevator button.

  Oh, her lips formed, though she didn’t quite say it. She exhaled, closing her blue eyes, then opening them wider, almost in surprise, and stared at him. They were sitting very close together, their faces almost touching.

  When he took his finger away she stretched the nylon over the bruise so he could better see its different gradations of blue. A pale green sheen surrounded it like an aura; purple capillaries ran off in all directions like tiny cracks, like a network of rivers on a map; there was violet at its center like a stain.

  “It’s ugly, isn’t it?” she asked in a whisper.

  He didn’t answer, but pressed it again, slowly, deeply, and her head tilted back against a cushion. This time the Oh of her lips was audible. She closed her eyes and moaned, uncrossing her legs. They were sitting so close together that the sound of her nails scraping along nylon seemed to him almost a clatter the painters would hear. Her legs opened a
nd he placed his palm against her and felt through the nylon heat, actual heat, like summer through a screen door.

  He pressed the bruise again and again. Each time she reshaped her lips into a vowel that sounded increasingly surprised.

  Outside, the house turned progressively whiter. The summer sun dissolved into golden, vaporish rays in the trees. The bruise—he never asked how she got it—spread across the sky.

  Ravenswood

  The Nun rides the streetcar named Asylum to the end of the Asylum Lake line. There’s no lake there, never was, but at least the buckled acres of parking lot becalmed before the abandoned shopping mall reflect the gliding shadows of circling gulls.

  “End of the line, Sister,” announces the Conductor; his name tag reads Martin. Conductor Martin rises from his seat in order to crank another name, the return destination, onto the front of the streetcar.

  “I’m not in the habit of doing this,” the Nun says from behind him. The Conductor hears the clack of the rosary beads girdled about her waist, and a rustle crackling with static electricity as she discards her woolly black robes, and as he turns still holding the crank, she knocks him silly with a blow from her missal.

  When he regains consciousness the Conductor finds himself hanging from a hand strap toward the rear of the streetcar. The rosary binds his wrists. He’s dressed—draped would be more accurate—in the Nun’s black robes; her sensible shoes, untied, pinch his feet. At least she has pinned the Martin name tag from what was his conductor’s uniform onto what is now his habit.

  At the front of the streetcar, cranking a new destination, the Nun wears his uniform and conductor’s hat. The blue jacket is too long for her arms; her breasts strain against the brass buttons. A shock of red hair tilts the hat at a rakish angle.

  “When I was a child, I thought nuns must be bald,” Martin recalls, and speaks the thought aloud in hopes of making conversation. “How wrong I was,” he adds in what he hopes is an ingratiating tone.

  She looks so jaunty as she thumbs tokens from his coin changer in the sunlight streaming through the front windows that he can’t be angry with her. Gulls caw and yipe excitedly as if out on Asylum Lake the smelt are rising. Sparrows gang on a single tree and make it twitter. He suddenly realizes that yes, it’s peaceful, even beautiful here at the end of the line to be a conductor stacking tokens in the sunlight. She reminds him so much of himself that he wants to emulate her. From his new perspective of dangling like a sausage, a rush of the pathetic emotion that a victim sometimes feels toward an oppressor overwhelms him: the illusion that such brutal attention is misguided love. He finds it poignantly flattering that this strange, undoubtedly fervent, religious woman has been driven to take such risks and employ such desperate measures to subdue him. What made her snap? he wonders. How often must she have sat unnoticed yearning for his attention? How many times at vespers did his name obliterate in her heart the name of the Lord?