Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories (7 page)

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 phone-sex 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.”

He turned the napkin over and drew a stick figure with a circle head, on which he sketched hair meant to mimic Britt’s moussed spiky hairstyle. He added Orphan Annie eyes, a big happy smile, and two tiny circles punctuated with periods for breasts. The figure, wearing high heels à la Minnie Mouse, stood with legs akimbo. At the V of her stick legs he scribbled in pubic hair.

“George, the sixties bush is out.”

He ignored her comment and drew an unadorned stick man kneeling before the female figure, with his oval head seemingly pressed to her scraggly crotch. “It was the word ‘intersection.’ I’m very impressionable,” he explained apologetically.

Britt blushed, then tried to grab the napkin. “It’s for my Great Moments scrapbook,” she said.

George managed to crush it up first. He stuffed it in his shirt pocket. “No paper trail,” he told her.

The waitress came by. “Everything okay? Dessert?” she asked.

“Just the bill, please,” George said, glancing at his watch.

The waitress set the bill on the table and George placed his credit card on top of it without bothering to check the amount.

“You pay at the cashier,” the waitress said, “but I’ll take it up for you if you want.”

“No, that’s okay,” George said.

“It’s no problem,” the waitress said.

“I’ll follow protocol,” George said. “I’ll put the tip on the credit card.”

“More coffee?” the waitress asked.

“We’re good, thank you,” George said.

After the waitress walked off, George put his key ring, cell phone, and ballpoint pen back in his pockets and slid the coffee cups and water glasses to the side with the salt and pepper shakers so that the stretch of table between him and Britt was clear.

“I’m sure she’d rather have the tip in cash, then you don’t have to report it,” he said. He wiped the trail that the water glasses left on the Formica with a napkin, then folded the wet napkin and placed it on top of the napkin dispenser. She silently watched him tidying up.

“You don’t have to tell me—I know I’m anal,” George said.

“Not for thirty-two thirteen you’re not.”

He stacked the money, the coins on top of the bills—it looked like a sizable tip—then slid it across the table. Britt didn’t reach for it. She remained seated, looking at the money piled before her.

“The ball’s in your court now,” George said.

“You want to see me take it, don’t you? That’s a turn-on. What if I don’t touch it? Just leave it between us? Would you pick it back up?”

George said nothing.

“Don’t worry, I won’t put you in that position.”

She lifted her purse from the seat, a pink-striped blue straw bag stuffed with her gym shoes, opened it at the edge of the table, and, as one might brush off crumbs, scooped the bills and change from the Formica into her purse.

“Did you like that?”

“It should be more,” George said.

“No problem. I’m making eighteen an hour to sit behind a desk all day. This is a significant raise.” She dug out a disposable lighter and a pack of Virginia Slims and stood. “I’ll be outside giving myself cancer,” she said. “Don’t forget John le Carré.”

George picked up his book, paid the cashier with his credit card, and went outside.

Britt was leaning against the brick wall, smoking.

“That money’s yours, no strings attached,” George said. “I know being a single mother’s no picnic. My mom raised me and my sister after our old man ran out on us.”

“Do you think that was about charity for either of us, George? I’d offer a receipt, but no paper trail,” she said.

“I don’t need one,” George said. “I’ll remember everything about it.”

“I’m glad you’ll get your money’s worth.”

Flu

Faye’s illness transformed her in a way no diet or face-lift could have. After days of nausea, vertigo, diarrhea; a fast of toast and tea; fever; dreams that came and went more like mirages; an aching lethargy that demanded fourteen-hour sleeping spells from which she’d wake confused but only too aware of how terribly alone she was, Faye felt better.

The usual grim weariness was gone from around her lips. Her eyes no longer peered out like a miner’s from sallow tunnels smudged with mascara. They seemed enlarged with light, glowing limpidly from her pale face. Even the shadow beneath her chin where her darkness most accumulated had burned away. It was as if everything unessential had burned away.

“What happened to you?” Aldo blurted, startled by the sight of her sitting, legs crossed, back behind the reception desk.

“Flu,” Faye said. “Everybody’s getting it. I mean, you sit up here in front all day and you’re going to come in contact with everything anybody walks in with.”

“Everybody should get so sick,” Aldo said.