I Smell Esther Williams (5 page)

“Where?”

She folds the paper and hands it to him.

“What’s that for?”

“It has something to do with that commercial where the Indian cries about pollution.”

“He reminds me of Anthony Quinn at the end of ‘Requiem For A Heavyweight.’ ”

“Is that … is that where Bogart does publicity for …”

“That’s not ‘Requiem …’ ”

“Let me finish.”

“I know what you’re talking about.”

“What?”

“That’s not ‘Requiem For A Heavyweight.’ That’s ‘The Harder They Fall.’ Bogart’s a sports writer and becomes a press agent for this mob’s fighter stable … no, for this mob-owned giant South American fighter who can’t fight. He’s a giant dumb fighter—the ‘Bull of the Pampas’ or something—and they let him get slaughtered and don’t pay him and he’s got poor parents and everything and finally at the end Bogart pays him out of his own pocket and writes a big exposé with his wife leaning over the typewriter.”

“Do you want a match?”

“No … wait … yeah, yeah—I thought I had one more in here.”

She reaches into a drawer across from the table.

“Here.”

He lights a True Menthol with a kitchen match.

“When you spoke to your father last, what did he say about your mother’s surgery?”

“What about it?”

“Does she need it or not or what?”

“Probably. She’s got an appointment this week or next week with a man in New York.”

“With Larry’s cousin?”

“Not Larry’s cousin—with a gastroenterologist.”

“At Mount Sinai?”

“Not at Mount Sinai—at his office.”

“She’s upset?”

“She’s probably upset. It’s not serious really.”

“What do you mean it’s not serious?”

“It’s not serious—she’ll probably need it done every once in a while from now on. It’s annoying and uncomfortable—but it’s not serious.”

“What’s serious to you?”

“A blood clot is serious, a broken hip is serious at her age, a heart attack is serious, a stroke …”

Paige had again found herself in the position of defending her stout republicanism. When the call to evacuate came over the wireless, we were like breathless kewpie dolls waiting to get knocked over. In retrospect, I think some of us were ready to tickle and goose each other, or slide down the banister like banshees, or almost kill each other … anything. Our wraith of a monarch had gotten us out of one jam too many. A child’s bib with scenes from a chiropractor’s office on it was draped over the trophy you’d received from the figure salon, and, in the sense of no two snowflakes being exactly alike, the spectrum of smirks seemed infinite and optimism’s things were taken from the guest room and heaped on a mattress of straw on the gatehouse’s cellar floor from which, ten years ago, we had watched the Jets defeat Baltimore. Suddenly, the investment of libidinal energy appeared transparently premature. And night fell like a skydiving student with an incompetent instructor.

So it was regretful when frog-voiced Dr. Bim revealed supper’s deceptive allure. “I don’t care what people say! I’m sick of pretending and scheming!” And burst into the florid leitmotif of the chain Burger Rex that fell on flushed burning ears.

When he shot her a glance that was like the pulsar at the
heart of the Crab Nebula, her body slang translated into the “missing mass” needed to bind the universe and she squirmed in her seat like Laura says Clarence does. She seemed muddleheaded. You could picture untreated waste surging up her carotid arteries, coursing through the plexus of aqueducts in her brain. She possessed all the qualities of a carrier. And there hadn’t been a shadow of doubt among us that she’d eventually beguile some eligible westerner with her ability to transmit vast quantities of data quickly and efficiently. She was, in this way, so much like the public—not issue oriented; and, in another way, so much like Moses—the apotheosis of style. Perhaps prosperity lay upon the far flung frontiers of the empire. There were ten thousand tons of gold in the Serra das Andorinhas to be had. Bim tapped the aspic mold of the Krupp munition plant with his teaspoon and watched it shake.

That ice-cold metal lozenge beat in his body, his demeanor not unlike a palindrome—identical coming and going. Natural history had never seemed less like a change of pace. My snaps cracked in the washer’s mini-basket tub and the red fragrant spine sizzled up the flue—the suspected mass of frizzled hair between the teeth of plumbers everywhere caused a great deal of unacknowledgeable anticipation. It was impossible to decide whether to stay or go and the local crowd had arrayed itself on both sides of the controversy … they’d quarrel and then make-up, quarrel and then make-up, quarrel and then make-up, quarrel and then make-up, quarrel and then makeup, and their eyes would turn like little pairs of sequins from wristwatch to wristwatch as if the time of day were a poker hand that someone held. In the refrigerator’s hum one could discern those unsettling lines from Edna Keeston’s poem “Chafing Dish Dinner Is My Name-O”: “… and exercise devices / developed by former Olympic athletes / girdle the planet.”

I had exhausted my patience trying to reason with him. He’d claimed that I brought the snowy weather with me—that I’d come through Union Station, D.C.’s gargantuanistic ecclesiastical
train station with contraband weather in my bags. She sat in front of a Titan heater and the rotating blade forced hot air against her cheeks. It felt hard in my pocket. Let’s make a mistake we’ll regret. Again I canvassed the neighborhood, with my masquerade and luggage—the sun gently tapered towards the corner of town. Again this sense of ethnicity, this sense of culpability, which, by day, surfaced like bubbles in beer, by nightfall was impossible to distinguish from the sidereal backdrop that exhausts bullets in its dense ultramarine. Footsteps were sloshy—sneakers filled with champagne. He’s got a staple gun, someone yelled. He’s stapling everyone’s hat to his head—trying to bring it all back to the 1930’s. J. Edgar Hoover—more effective when he and the gangsters he chased dressed alike. But it had all happened once too often. E-Street across from the FBI Building, a hamburger joint, boys with radios strapped like life support systems to their bodies. It started snowing. It started snowing again. From the window, this was not visible. A striped feather fell like a limp wrist from the wine bottle on its sill and the flying saucer was an astringent to the eyes.

God, it was beautiful and while some aliens disappear through the brackish surfaces of patio pools, change their names, and erect lawn ornaments towards which citizens in transit direct their heated comment, others cling to tradition, the women allowing the hair beneath their arms to grow until it tumbles to their elbows like hanging plants. A week before our birthdays, we turned restlessly in bed. Lay in our submarine. Swayed in the hammock in our submarine. Held our ankles and held our heads between our knees. I dreamt I was the plane’s pilot and bombed the city. How I’d hold you in my mind. The amaranth of your face wafted in the day’s crests and troughs. But it was no good. Smitty felt pressure from his mother’s side of the family to marry only a girl who believed that the sun revolved around the earth. He felt pressure expand at his skull’s seams and he had a bottle of Irish whiskey to drink. I stuck a finger into the St. Croix bric-a-brac. Good-bye
saucer, alien, sub, pilot, hinged headache, whiskey, bric-a-brac, stuffed nose. Good-bye full bladder, cher ami.

I suspected that someday this message for you would be transmitted through the neutrino mail, and ease through the earth’s core, emerging someday in your smallville, and slipping through the gold slot at the bottom of your door: Where did we go wrong? What roadsign, in the moonless night, through the murkiness of our tinted glass, did we misinterpret? Why didn’t you say what you meant about your needs at a time when our levels of wholeness were originating in our being meaningfully instead of possessively involved in the feelings we mutually held but mutually refused to acknowledge on any terms other than our own respectively, as if by different treasure maps we could arrive at the same X-marks-the-spot in terms of us? Should we have sought professional counseling?

The cab driver retrieved a discolored rag from beneath his seat and stanched the steady trickle of blood from a wound above one eye that had been inflicted by the jagged tip of a teakwood-handled parasol belonging to his previous fare. The embassy flagpoles were empty. Certain types, I thought to myself, are utterly practical, in the tradition, for instance, of the pioneering test pilots who logged their flight data in pencil because ink would freeze at higher altitudes. As we neared the General Accounting Office, I glanced at my watch and yielded to a sudden impulse, directing the driver to undertake a slight detour. Call it hackneyed, call it sentimental, but I had to see the Tidal Basin just once more. And idling near its shore, I spied them: two entwined smartly-dressed saplings cooing like Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald beneath a naturally formed gazebo of Japanese cherry blossoms. “There,” he said, waving up at the glorious canopy of inviolable American air space, “is where our thoughts are kept after we die.” “The Washington Monument,” she mumbled, “is a mammoth white french fry stretching towards the mouth of a celestial teenage presence,” and he turned and turned and turned and the lights from the high rises along the Potomac trembled in the water.

The train was filled with spirits of the dead stained with the dross that hung in the air, not from New Jersey, but from its filthy neighboring states like Pennsylvania. The train was filled with a spirit of dandruff and with basketball players … with their portable lives. And passengers were employing telekinesis to get lunch rather than wait on line and the air was filled with slow moving sandwiches, but now and then an alarming biological clock-radio would spark a mini-disturbance. Then in Trenton, a girl named Polly sat next to me wearing white patent leather shoes with little straps and she peered at me as if I were the creditor-dodging dabbler in laudanum and abnormality from whom she had undoubtedly fled, but, in the unblemished light of thorough scrutiny, the resemblance apparently vanished, and when she got a big package of tootsie rolls out of a shiny little white purse, I dove for my cigarettes, almost surrendering to impulse once more, almost blurting out “this is the planet of escapes, let’s you and I swallow the key and stay awhile,” almost quoting the astronomer from
It Came From Outer Space
, “… this may be the biggest thing that ever happened,” but I became nauseated by the confluent odors of tootsie roll and Prince Matchabelli, and in my pants my penis drooped like the long ash of a burning cigarette. And then we stopped in front of a large Johnson & Johnson plant to let cattle cross over the tracks. So beautiful. Through the plant’s grounds ran a network of pseudo-Venetian canals filled with the most luxuriant lotions and powders for the delectation of both rail and automobile traffic. And shortly after we resumed our progress, I resumed my observation of the passing Jersey flora.

I arrived at my parents’ winter home in time to see the LaConti Construction crew unload from its truck the nine-foot marble head from Daniel Chester French’s statue “Neapolitan Fisherboy Listening To A Short-Wave Radio.” In his desperation to find me a suitable birthday gift, Father had hired LaConti to decapitate the statue which was on loan to the Newark Museum from the National Gallery. I had always been very keen on French’s work. My sister, on the other hand, had
always been a gravity buff. “Father,” I said, “what have you done? You’ve defaced a national treasure.” Mother wrung her hands, “You test us and test us—holding your breath till you’re blue—getting outa the car, into the car, outa the car—you drive us to it!” Father snapped a bulbous rubber nose into place, “Gotta split—G-men after us—take care of the firm, boy of mine.” “What did you get Ruth?” I yelled after him. “Go see, she’s in her room,” he said, wrapping his arms around Mother’s waist, their moped zipping down the driveway. I dashed upstairs. There, suspended magnetically above her beanbag chair, was a specially annealed niobium cylinder. My sister was on the couch in the fond clutches of her fiancé who had a nearly two-dimensional head—it was the flattest head I’d ever seen—her sweater was bunched up around her neck and her unsnapped brassiere rested above her bare breasts like eyeglasses on someone’s forehead. What a meshugena gift.… We all felt smaller and smaller in the coming days, which seemed shorter and shorter. And everything seemed diminished and fly-by-night.

Well, what is so new about Jersey? Or Mexico. Or England. What could be new in this multiplication of the present … in these bowdlerized translations from the rural? The good life, so called, is over, and that laugh we’d flexed hangs a bit flaccidly between our ears … we seem serious about wanting to outlive each other … and that may be the one source of all travel.

We are unhappy fleas, aren’t we.

Well, if ever there was a rebuttal to marital felicity—they were it. He inevitably left the oven on and compared her Belgian waffles to old sanitary napkins and never saw to it that there were enough bulbs in the house, and she, as you could imagine, was not the easiest person in the world to get along with, but … listen to me.… I’ve been chattering away like a galley slave, and look at the hour. The sun is up, and it’s time to let the greyhounds chase me round the track. Again.

Hoping that one last slug of warm Shlitz would give him the courage to finally say to Patty, “I love your breasts, the way one breast presses against the U of your sweatshirt, the way the other presses against the A, making the S a spot where a man could lay his head in peace,” Oscar tipped his airline cup to his lips. But the words wouldn’t come and god Oscar wanted to slip his hand under that shirt and feel her warm bare back and kiss her freckled nose. “This is where I get off,” he said, crestfallen, squeezing past Patty’s knees and ambling up the aisle to the door of the plane. “Bye,” he waved sheepishly; and he jumped. As he fell through the air, he looked up towards Patty’s window and Patty was frantically waving his parachute in her hand, yelling “Oskie, you forgot this!” Oscar’s descent, being the shortest path between two points, was swift. He hit the ground with an awful thud. I was the first to reach him. “Oscar, buddy, ol’ pal of mine, say a few syllables,” I said. His eyes seemed a bit glazed. “Someone just hit me in the head with a pillow,” he said. “Oscar, Oscar,” I keened, “You’re seven-eighths dead, you’re all busted up like a ceramic Buddha dropped from the World Trade Center—do you have any last words?” I wet his lips with my italian ices. “All I ever wanted to do,” he whispered, “was finish my novel … and drag a good Catholic girl through the mud a few times.” “Ciao, old friend,” I said. Randy, Normandi, Ray, Rachel, Wayne, and me—we’ll never forget you.