Anagrams (21 page)

“Endurance is a country in Central America,” says Gerard. “It has nothing to do with love. As for requited, that has nothing to do with anything. Except, my dear, you and me.” He extends a long, curving arm. He kisses me. I say good night, I have to go, I have to go home and make honey milk.

Gerard walks me out to my car. It’s dark already, and the night sky is beautiful and cold. Gerard points up to it. “You see the sky?” he sings to the tune of an old Herb Alpert song. “The sky’s in love with you …”

I hold up the tail end of an egg roll. I look Gerard straight in the beard. “I am a wok,” I say, “I am an island.” Then I get in my car and drive away.

Darrel has keys, I hear the jangle and thud downstairs, and soon he has slipped into bed beside me.

“Did you say something?” he asks. He glides his hand down the side of my ribcage.

“No. Why?”

“I thought you said something.”

“No,” I say. “Did you?”

“No,” he says.

This morning I get up to correct papers and it’s still dark outside, the streetlights still on. I put some water on for coffee, then wander out into the living room. I glance out the front window, and there’s a woman in slippers and a robe standing in the middle of the street, grinning and waving at me as if she’d been standing there all night just waiting for me to look out and find her. I shut the curtains, terrified, then peek out again to see if she’s still there.
She is and gives me a glorious, gregarious wave. She sees me, recognizes me, knows me—how does she know me? Oh my god. I walk to the kitchen and back. I peek out again. Only the frozen gray street—she has vanished.

The greatest number of accessory mammae was reported in 1866 by Neugebauer, who found ten in one woman.

Many images of Diana, the virgin goddess, portray her as polymastic, having over a dozen breasts. They look like clusters of tropical fruit; she doesn’t look too displeased but then she’s a goddess why the hell should she.

Tonight Gerard plays at the Ramada in the Nickelodeon Lounge, a space lit with dusky rose lights, the ceilings dangling coleus and mingy philodendra and spidery antique fans which are motionless and probably don’t work. With a small stack of student poems, I sit in one of the booths that line the far wall. The upholstery is a sort of crooked Aztec, the table waxy polyurethaned cherry. Gerard is at the piano up front in a coral-hued spotlight, swaying from side to side, fingers dribbling along the keyboard while he chats exuberantly at the audience, various members of which look up occasionally from their veal cutlets and fried mushrooms to nod, clap, or laugh with their mouths full. I give him a subtle wave and a broad wink, and he smiles, armlessly directing one of his jokes my way: “What did one lady cannibal say to the other lady cannibal? ‘I don’t know what to make of my husband these days. Could I borrow a recipe?’ ”

The audience likes it, likes the idiocy of all this, though one woman near me has glanced down at her stroganoff and complained, “Please, not while we’re eating.” Gerard begins singing the
Cabaret
medley, his high notes occasionally strained and misshapen. When he gets to the song “Married,” he stops singing for a moment, his hands continuing in some bland arpeggios, and he
says, “My wife: She’s one in a million. I just have to make sure she doesn’t find out.” A large white-haired man to my left, part of a two-couple foursome, guffaws loudly, then gets swatted in the arm by the woman next to him. Gerard smiles at me and moves quickly on through to the end of the song, the musical-comedy bliss of marriage. Gerard has never had a wife. Sometimes I think he knows too many philanderer and lady cannibal jokes to ever have one. “What did one lady cannibal say to the other lady cannibal?” he’s now asking. “ ‘Boy, is my husband in hot water!’ ” He bangs out some loud chords, there are some amused groans. Another lady cannibal joke is about how to make a husband stew. With onions.

I’m not sure why he feels so brutalized, or why he’s directing so many of these my way. Perhaps this is my self-centeredness, my failure to really know Gerard.

He finishes up the
Cabaret
medley. I applaud vigorously, and he nods, says thank you, keeps playing. He is trying to appear tireless. He creeps a ways into a Louis Armstrong song—“I went down to St. James infirmary / Met my baby there / Saw her laid out on the table / So sweet, so cold, so bare”—and then quickly moves into a Fats Waller tune, “Keeping Out of Mischief Now,” a weird, dark wit to the juxtaposition. This song is pretty, and Gerard sings it with his eyes closed, his electrically haloed face raised toward the ceiling, a religious painting in bright colors on black velvet. I think for a brief, glowy moment that even though people are getting up and heading for the salad bar, loading up with pickled beets, pickled corn, pickled beans—kidney, string, wax—that they appreciate Gerard, that he really is talented, that in some endless way I too will always be in love with him.

The song is over, but his fingers still linger on the keyboard, a salad-bar tinkle.

At the break the spotlight goes off and he comes over and
sits at my booth. “More freshman poems?” He riffles quickly through the pile, a polite curiosity.

“Yeah, I keep thinking of leaving them at the salad bar. Next to the croutons, like an alternative lettuce.”

Gerard smiles wearily, then buries his face in his hands, a pianist’s hands, leathered trees of knobs, dour veins, branches of fingers. I reach over and touch his forearm. He feels embarrassed working here. The salad bar gets to him.

“I can’t come out,” he says, not removing his hands. “Not for at least ten minutes.”

I feel superfluous, a giant, wet flesh match in a sweater I just bought on sale this afternoon. “Okay,” I say, and we sit there, silent, sad, his shoulders heaving twice, his face vanished into his palms until finally, a long finally, he wipes his hands down slowly off his face and though pink-eyed and sleepy, he looks all right again. He has used up most of his ten minutes, and the spotlight has come back on, and no one is in it, a signal that Gerard’s break is over.

I take Gerard’s hand. “ ‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?’ ”

“Shit,” says Gerard, glancing over his shoulder. He picks up my empty drink and chugs it back. The ice cubes knock against his teeth and upper lip. “ ‘Churl,’ ” he says, putting the glass back down with a clunk. “ ‘Drunk all and left no friendly drop to help me out?’ ”

When we are depressed, we quote Shakespeare, to put things in perspective. Between us we know about five lines, which limits our perspective.

“How come you’re always Juliet and I’m always Romeo?” I moan.

“That, my dear,” says Gerard, getting up, “is the question of the century. We shall take it up anon.”

“A nun?” I bat my eyelashes, place my hands in prayer position.

“You have a silly brain,” he says, and tweaks my nose, this new habit of his.

“
I
have a
silly brain
?” I act appalled. I cross my eyes, spread my lips crazily, pull my hair up on end. I want to be happy.

“Bonne nuit,” he waves and shakes his head. Some of the pink has left his eyes. He is smiling.

“Ennui.” I wave back.

“Mom?” Georgie has switched the light on in her room.

“Yeah?” I walk in and she is sitting on the edge of her bed with nothing on but her underpants. The edges of her hair are damp and sticking to her face like the chic hairstyles of 1930 or 1963. Her skin is white and warm as bread.

“Why did you take your pajamas off, honey?”

“Did Mrs. Kimball go home?”

“Yes, she did. Aren’t you feeling well?” In sickness and in sickness, till death do us part.

“I can’t sleep,” she says.

“I noticed. How come?” I locate her nightgown underneath her pillow and smooth her hair back with it, like a towel.

“I dunno.”

“You don’t know?”

“Uh-uh. Mary Merwin is going to have a baby brother or a baby sister.”

“Who’s Mary Merwin?”

“She’s a girl.”

I help her get back into her nightgown. “You know, it’s turning into winter out there.”

“Mr. Winter-binter.”

She’s not sleepy.

I stand up and do my Statue of Sleep-Liberty imitation. Yawning and holding a torch: “ ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ ”

George smiles and I lean over and give her a
puffle
, something my mother used to do with us: press mother’s mouth against child’s neck and blow out air. It’s warm and wet and tickles. George tenses, shoulders up by her ears in anticipation, her whole body in a scrinch—then she giggles and relaxes. “Do it again,” she says, and I do it twice more.

“See you tomorrow, schminker-schmunker,” I say, love dissolving language into funny sounds, non-words.

“See you tomorrow, schminkie-schmunkie,” she giggles.

I wrinkle my nose, make a face. She sticks out her tongue and makes a humming sound. I blow her a kiss from the doorway, and she does a Bronx cheer in parody, an arm puffle, and I turn off the light.

B
.

Gerard is having some hot affair with a woman named Merrilee. He thinks he may be in love.

“Arouse by any other name is still arouse,” I say. “Can I get—yeah, the ketchup. Thanks.”

“She ought to have a sign across her pelvis that reads ‘Abandon all hope, you who enter here.’ ” Gerard stuffs an egg into his beard.

“Personally, I always liked the one in
The Wizard of Oz
better: ‘I’d turn back if I were you.’ ”

Gerard looks at me from over his coffee cup, sets it down with a chipping clink, and sighs in joy. Gerard never sighs in joy. “I swear, it’s like sleeping with a
Playboy
magazine.” He smiles contentedly.

“Yeah, my brother used to do that,” I say. “Only with him it was really a magazine.” Under his bed my brother Louis had more pictures of nude women than an art museum. I remember hearing my mother say to him once in a loud, scolding whisper: “Louis! Don’t play with your genitals!” which I thought was the same word as
gentiles
—leaving me greatly bewildered as to whom we were supposed to play with.

“Well, Gerard,” I say, leaning back and fishing through my purse for cigarettes. “Congratulations.”

I am driving home from the supermarket. It took much longer than I would have liked. George wandered off by herself to stare at the candy, while I loaded up on canned goods and had my fruit weighed—something vaguely sexual-sounding, something that Eleanor might say. I also had to spend too much time in the meat department, having a turkey sliced in half (also something Eleanor might say). Roasting only half a turkey and freezing the other half is a trick I learned from my mother, something for small and/or budget-impaired holidays. The butcher takes it in the back room, where there are carcasses, fish smells, and lots of white jackets, and where he has some sort of electric blade that whips through the bones and the plastic wrapper. Then he loosely ties the two halves back together with string and brings them out and grins and thrusts them at you.

By the time we get home it’s a dark, denimish twilight. George has chocolate in the chap of her lips.

“Georgie, can you help me with the groceries?” I lean over and unlock the door.

“Yup,” she says, putting her mittens on.

I get out, go around back, unlock the hatch. I hear the telephone ringing in the house, grab a bag, and bound up the back steps into the kitchen. I put the bag down on the counter and it slips and falls into the sink, but no matter.

I want it to be Darrel. “Hello?” I’m breathless, I think from the dash in.

“Hi, it’s me,” says Gerard. “I was just about to hang up. Did you just get in?”

“Hi. Yeah,” I say, trying to hide my disappointment like a venereal disease, like someone sick from love. “Listen, can I phone you back? I’m bringing groceries in right now.”

“Actually, Benna my love, in about sixty seconds I’m leaving town for a family Thanksgiving with Maple at his parents’. I just wanted to phone and say bye.”

“Yeah, well: Have a good Thanksgiving, Gerard.”

“You, too,” says he. And then we hang up. I sigh and begin to pull groceries out of the sink, when I hear Georgianne crying outside. I hurry back out and see her sitting on the steps in the cold, sobbing into her knees. “Georgianne, honey, what’s the matter?” I say, sit next to her, put my arms around her and she tilts and leans into me, sobbing harder. I look and see that the bottom of a grocery bag she has struggled with has apparently ripped and various groceries including oranges and the two turkey halves, now unstrung and separated, have formed a small scatter about the driveway.

“Mom,” wails George, lifting her face and pointing out at the driveway. “Mom, I broke the turkey!”

Thanksgiving itself is not so cute. Almost everyone I know—Darrel and Gerard—have gone visiting moms and pops.

For dinner at my house it’s just Eleanor, George, and I. George is cranky and doesn’t set the table properly. “George,” I remind her, “the forks go on the left.”

“They don’t have to if they don’t want to,” she says, all knuckles and recalcitrance and averted gaze.

I’ve spent five hours peeling and chopping chestnuts for stuffing, while various parades have been blaring from the TV in the living room. Eleanor arrived an hour ago and has been helping me; now she’s at the table stirring chives into the sour cream so that we can eat elegant baked potatoes. My cuticles are shredded and sore; I shake a finger at Georgianne. “Don’t give me any lip, young lady.”

George makes a face. “Don’t give me any lip, young mleh-mleh.”

I put down the nutcracker I’m holding, bend over, grab her wrist, drag her near. “Do you
understand
?”