I Smell Esther Williams (11 page)

The bassoon seems to say, what do you know about setting up a business letter? and the strings seemingly retort in unison, as much as you do! Who was it that couldn’t find the key to the xerox machine after being here six months. An impish staccato passage from the first violins recalls the Czech “Furiant”, a lively Bohemian dance in 3/4 meter, and, with its sudden changes from melancholy to exuberance, evokes Dvorak’s “Dumky Trio.” As the timpani and basses augur an almost subterranean ritardando, the orchestra segues into a bucolic
conciliatory movement that seems to suggest, this office is like an eco-system—managerial duties, secretarial duties, maintenance responsibilities, switchboard and messenger service—all mesh in a synergetic, mutually advantageous hierarchy, that necessarily precludes petty squabbles and bitching.

The rugged family room atmosphere would have been shattered had the Guffs known that the poodles were suffocating in their station wagon. But soon they would find the still poodles. Let’s eavesdrop:

Re: Lansing visit with Barbara. I, Mark Leyner, repudiate everything I said about uncharted human relations. The first night in Lansing, we fucked three times—each time more tedious than the one before. She kept wanting more more more more more satisfaction. For four days she talked about her heat without let-up, like a disgusting pig … always with a bottle of Tab jammed into her mouth—a shiny red mouth that seemed like the only sign of life enshrouded in the dough of her fat flesh. Uh-oh Barbara’s coming—I better stop and put this away.

Every person at the colloquium thought Kathleen an overweening prima donna. And when round robin discussion opened, more depressing invective than ever filled the shape of its container. In a parade, they unfurled their skeins of initials. With craven unanimity, they blasted Kathleen with their ill-conceived and pleonastic implosions. But still, amidst this wilting, Kathleen (a little drunk) delivered her statements inviting the very adversaries present before her to give up, to lie down, to die, to rot, to become ant food.

Today, people look for “fiber” in their food like Ponce de Léon looking for the fountain of youth—the pool of puerility that’s been cussed and discussed. That’s as real as a pomegranate poo-bah. But her rear looks like a cleft pomegranate, but her rear is a red herring. The real issue is her royal flush of boyfriends that runs from Jerk to Asshole.

The aroma of green tinder imbued his albums and bloodmobile & when he saw wisps of her by the rigid percolator, his eyes rolled like egg yolks on a piano bench being moved from room to room, and his hand was observed by witnesses in a town five miles away, around the neck of a bottle of Chivas Regal.

They kissed, but the warm contents of her mouth troubled him like an automat’s pot-luck. And the Tudor arches afforded an incomplete view of her bus.

The affidavit states that he said “Ahoy there!” when he arrived. That she chewed and swallowed a photograph of his swami. He lists “choking on a piece of food at an embassy party” as his #1 phobia; she lists “the smell of gasoline” as her favorite olfactory turn-on, and “giving myself paper-cuts” as her most debilitating hobby.

“What a beautiful gun … more beautiful than the three pointed at your back, amigo.”

“Give it to me straight. I can take it. How long do I have?” “About two seconds.” “Put that gun down!” “After all the misery you’ve put me through …” “Misery? What misery?!”

I made a mental catalogue of the spread: a rosewood desk on embossed “lion’s paw” legs / photograph of a woman in filoplume hat and child on a mechanical hobby-horse / golfball paperweight / an overturned rosewood Windsor chair / a disarray of legal and steno pads and pencils / a half-torn letter reading “… ght. Can’t we begin again—without suspicions and recriminations—can’t we say to each other—I made a mistake—that each night I spent apart from you was filled with sadness and emptiness—because that’s how it was for me. If only you hadn’t …” / a bust of Nefertiti / a calendar-penholder / a set of windows with drawn shades / a coatrack / an oriental-style taboret / a Morris chair with dark green chamois leather cushions / an open bottle of gin on a mock-filigree fold-out bar / an ashtray filled with butts, some bearing lipstick traces.

She coughed—a dainty little cough like that of an antique miniature Basin-Pull steam engine.

“Shoot” I said.

She opened her pocketbook and took out a plaid cloth-covered cigarette box. In a slow, cautious, unassumingly economical motion, I reached into my vest pocket and withdrew a lighter which I displayed in the air before flicking. She leaned over and, smoothing a wisp of hair behind her ear, lit her cigarette. She took a quick nervous puff and fidgeted with a loose thread at the hem of her skirt and then with the chipped plastic viridine green button over one of the mock pockets of her blouse.

“Shoot” I said.

She gnawed at a hang-nail briefly and then tugged at the charm bracelet at her wrist. Crossing and uncrossing her legs, she scratched a discolored patch of flesh on her cheek. She kicked one of her pumps off, slid it under the chair with her foot, and loosened the nainsook Montpellier green bow at her collar.

“Shoot” I said.

I’ve got to get some rest now—tomorrow’s leather pounding time—flat-footing … gumshoeing … hawkshawing … what’s in a name anyway—tomorrow the sun rises—I shake the bones out of my hair—rinse the sea-weed out of my mouth—palliate these gripping cramps with some luke-warm juice and go out and make a dirty god damn shit-eating motherfucking buck. My name’s Leyner … Mark Leyner—I wasn’t born with that name—I earned it … believe me.

(Comments after the death of John D. Rockefeller 3d)

It’s difficult to empathize with anyone. But it’s like impossible to comprehend the fright with which one, after not having been home for literally years—the fright with which one reaches into his old bureau—into his tenebrous grotto of a drawer—the fright with which one reaches into a drawer, right, and into the unsympathetic length of his tattiest dowdiest widowed sock and have like pains shoot up his dorsal environs. You want to say “see you in the funny papers” and burrow straight under that Disneyesque counterpane immediately. Life is, au fond, not for the chicken-hearted. Stan Musial, when he was physical fitness consultant to the president in ’65 wrote, “… there is no equality of opportunity—in
education, in employment, or in any other area—for persons who are weak and lethargic, timid and awkward, or lacking in energy and the basic physical skills.”

What considerations must be taken into account when looking for a man to marry? Can, for instance, one woman’s priorities accommodate both astrological affinity
and
the extent to which a gentleman has built up equity? And what form does that equity take? Has it been accumulated in a piecemeal, haphazard manner, consisting of, say, a television, stereo, toaster, wardrobe, clock-radio, and turquoise ring or two? Is its value apparent only with respect to a certain connoisseurship, as in the case of my friend Randall Schroth’s antique car?

In this regard, what occupies the mind of someone like Brooke Shields’ mother? Miss Shields, whose pool of nuptial possibility is rife with the most conniving piranha. Has the thought of an arranged marriage not occurred to the mother of this extraordinary girl? An arranged marriage of the sort that was common in a host of venerable cultures, including the Akwe-Shavante Indians of Central Brazil and the Heian court of 10th century Japan.

Although judging from coeval texts such as
The Pillow-Book of Sei Shonagon
and
The Tale of Genji
, the feudal Japanese court boasted enough heavy action, (conducted surreptitiously behind screens of wattled bamboo or rather ostentatiously, in keeping with the fabulously amoral Zeitgeist of the period), to curl hair upon the nape of the most coy and prim of handmaidens’ necks or to unravel the top-knot of even the most phlegmatic warrior.

Oh great, Werner from my soap opera “To Knot the Grey Nuts” is dying. That phony … It’s good to see his hopes blow up in his face!

Ray thought it was funny that my toilet is coin-operated—but what does he think this apartment complex is, a public school? Up in the rarefied air of
my
income bracket, you get what you pay for, Ray!

The last thing she said was, “I’m about to be discovered. I’ve been pitting all my friends against each other.”

So I said, “That’s an intensely delicate operation to have undertaken. And I really admire intense individuals. In fact, people have said that I have a certain intensity. A certain ‘I don’t know what exactly.’ A certain hunger for truth … a certain thirst for adrenaline maybe. Perhaps an unnatural affection for danger, a latent death wish … a kind of hopelessly self-destructive Weltschmerz. Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“I’m about to be discovered. I’ve been pitting all my friends against each other.”

The October weather has been delightful. Like that crisp breeze just now. Did you see how rosy it made my cheeks? The playoff games have been more than body and soul can bear. Vitamin E has transformed my scalp into a fertile promised land. But the dead Pope looks like an ornate canary laid out that way.

Some afternoons, the sun hits my phonebook at just the right angle and light shimmers off its cover like shards of topaz. Other men may be stalled in traffic, asleep with their succubi. Other men may be sitting down to dinner already. These men
eat too early! But we men are such a club. With our habits and clothes. We love to kiss babies when we campaign. And we love to drink coffee. And that accounts for the sheer voluminosity of our philosophies, all that coffee.

Ah, October whatever it is. I’m back in the saddle again. I’m the story of lovely lady who was very very very bewitching. As George Eliot said of Dorothea Brooke in
Middlemarch
, “Most men thought her bewitching when she was on horseback.” I feel as if a sixteen ounce glove has softened the fist of fate’s devastating uppercut. I feel as if horse tranquilizer has slowed the team that aproaches with my hearse. As if firemen have discovered new ladders, to discover me. The addlepated officer, retrieved, fighting a war that ended thirty-three years ago. The last of the Mohicans. The final Brontosaurus-burger sold on a Sat. night. Half swan, half doe. With feathers of Chantilly lace and hooves of translucent quartz.

On the other hand, I’m an insular queen amidst all this exalted glee, amidst these Visa cards and platters of cheese and smoked lox. Even when I’m playing bridge, I have to worry about my ex-husband’s friends bombing my oil fields. In the dead of night, having to throw on a few things and go join the bucket line. It may be just a false alarm that a kid’s idle hands turned in or a ruse contrived by my sister to get me to my surprise party! I don’t know what to say. “For me?” or “You shouldn’t have!” or simply “I don’t know what to say.” But the simultaneous sensation of rampant happiness and anxiety results in a kind of torsion that is exhilarating.

Aaaaaaahhh! To sleep, though, I need to be tapped not so gently on the forehead with a rubber mallet. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz …

It feels magnificent, in this Morristown orchard, heaving apples towards the doe, with you, to end something here with this kissing and this tacitly fiducial understanding that this finality has all the taut resilience of a trampoline lofting us back next time across the flat lasagna pans that our separate individual lives have devolved towards … this monody of kissing—this flicker of emulsion.

The germs in her nostril clung from tiny hairs which bristled like stalactites, and she said “Ahhhhhhchoooooo!” And from her delicious mouth sallied forth bits of a cyclist moving from left to right, bits of blue body-warm linen, bits of a tattle, bits of sky—of its blue polyhedra, bits of a spritz.

— Gesundheit.

— Thanks.

“May I have this dance, senorita?”

“You are indeed a wonderful man, Captain Parker!”

— Thanks.

Everyone throw your beach balls at Liz Fox. Tonight? Liz Fox. Someone said “Liz Fox has the copies.” Liz Fox arrived and left. O.K., enough Liz Fox anecdotes! Liz Fox said “The thicket is covered with petrol.” Liz Fox had become a trembling oil spill. Did you hear? Liz Fox wanted my recipe. Someone’s creating the “Liz Fox” look. My family was huddled around the radio when Liz Fox said, “Today will live in infamy.” Liz Fox had a magazine and walked a crooked mile. Liz Fox is a notorious terrorist with international extortion never far from her thoughts. This is the first edition of Liz Fox. Liz Fox moved her tomato plants away from the window to keep them from freezing. “They’re cleaning Liz Fox up” was in the news. Can’t you find Liz Fox’s name in the white pages, foreign student? Standing at the far end of his yellow station-wagon, Liz Fox felt sad again. Liz Fox lost her baby and couldn’t let go but it was just her soap opera that was on. That guy fitted Liz Fox for gauntleted gloves. Liz Fox demanded that they reopen the investigation of the Attica massacre. Some guys smoked about a gram of really fine Liz Fox while they listened to records. Everyone followed Liz Fox to the out-of-the-way restaurant. Dance Liz Fox. Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Rip your wig off! Liz Fox said “Tomorrow will be better than today was!”