Love Monkey (11 page)

“Don't blame this on the gorilla,” I say, slipping Shooter two twenties. “You're the one who brought him. I had a plan. You and Mike I can trust.”

Now Ned is over on this side of the table. How'd he get here? Did somebody give him a map?

“Hey,” says Shooter. “Hey, hey.” He's coming over too, but the tequila has slowed him down.

“I'm nobody's ape,” Ned says. “Maybe
you
'd like to step outside?”

“Come on, Magilla,” I say. “Let the grown-ups discuss this.”

Ned has me in a headlock and Shooter is pounding on his back and screaming gibberish when Julia comes back. Mike has disappeared somewhere below table level. I think he's gnawing on Ned's ankle. The waitress, demonstrating for the first time all evening her ability to move at a speed greater than the feckless Euro drift, is dashing madly behind the bar and yelping girlishly. Tattletale. The bartender doesn't look happy. Now he's coming over. He's bigger than me too.

“Czzzzech pleeeeeease,” I say through my crushed windpipe.

Fortunately, I have the privilege of being thrown out first. The guys are still inside arguing over the check when Julia and I hit the night air.

“Lovely,” she says. “Drinks,
and
a show.”

Does that mean phonier than a Kansas City dinner theater production of
Cats? I wonder as I rub my neck. I read somewhere—or was it
merely a tabloid invention?—that when the ancient Greeks used to do
Oedipus
, they'd force a slave to play the title role. So that way, at the end, they could really stick hot pokers in the guy's eyes. And De Niro thinks he invented method acting.

“My brave gladiator,” she says. “Here.”

And she starts massaging my neck.

“Next time,” she says. “Can I pick the place?”

Next time. I like the sound of that.

She has an hour to kill until her train to Connecticut, so we stumble around the Upper West Side for a while, not saying much. She looks small and shivery in her yellow coat and white mittens. The cold is stinging my eyes. Up on the corner I spot inspiration. The all-night grocery store with its beckoning fruits and vegetables. Sometimes the fluorescent light strip over the produce aisle browns out. It was like that yesterday. This creates possibility.

“Come on,” I say.

The light is still out. The produce aisle sits under a canopy of incongruous barroom darkness. Word has gotten around. A tall preppie in a fishing hat and his little Korean girlfriend are in a dim corner laughing over their stolen grapes. Two gay men and their little gay dog loiter suggestively among the kumquats.

“You're
so
bad,” Julia says as I put a wild blueberry in her mouth.

“Shh,” I say. “No one will know if we eat the evidence.”

We almost bump into another couple, a fresh-faced blonde and an artsy-looking guy, both wearing identical chunky glasses, laughing dirtily. We let them pass before resuming our crime spree.

“I love the feel of things,” she says, cradling an orange in both hands, testing its pebbled skin. She holds it up to her nose and takes a long whiff. “The smell, the color. The way something can be so rough and rubbery on the outside and so tender under the skin.”

It's true. I usually motor right past this aisle to the things that come in cans and packages. I haven't spent more than two minutes
in this aisle before. But through her eyes it all looks saucy and flirtatious. Broccoli is stacked like a wall of bush. Stalks of corn await circumcision.

“Smell this,” she says, holding a lemon under my nose.

I draw in a deep breath, feeling the citrus writing its name in my brain. It makes me a little bit drunker.

“It's like the porno section of the video store,” I say. “Everything's so round and juicy and ripe. It should all be hidden behind a curtain so the children don't stumble on it.” The permanent excitement of the bananas and cucumbers reminds me of myself in eighth grade; the heads of lettuce look born to strip. I try not to contemplate the fuzzy ovular kiwis. Just thinking about some perv walking up and giving them a squeeze makes my balls ache.

“Oh my God those
straw
berries,” she says.

I take one out of a box and eat half of it.

“Gimme,” she says. She makes a grab for it.

I yank it out of reach.

“Uh-uh,” I say.

She just watches me.

“Close your eyes,” I say. And she does. Her lips seem to part involuntarily, waiting. I rub half a strawberry across her top lip, down and around and on to the bottom lip. Then I do another lap, at half speed. And another, even slower than that. Years are going by. Her mouth widens a bit. Her eyes seem to shut tighter. Then I give her the berry and she takes a little bird nibble. And another. Making it last. She still doesn't open her eyes. She holds my hand as though I'm lighting her cigarette. She flares her nostrils in fruity rapture. A little stream of juice runs down her chin. It takes her five languid bites to get through a berry. And then she kisses my fingers.

She looks up at me with big mischievous eyes. “Come here,” she says. And I lean in for the kiss.

I don't get one. She does a smart about-face and leads me down the
aisle. There are big open barrels of coffee beans sitting there. Arabica. Sumatra. Colombian espresso. “Try this,” she says. “This is the best feeling.” She shrugs off her coat, hands it to me. And she plunges her right hand into a barrel of French roast. All the way up to the elbow. She turns her arm this way and that. Working her muscles.

“It feels so weird when you clench and unclench your fist. And rotate your wrist. It's like entering a different atmosphere,” she says. “Another planet. I could take a bath in this stuff and just, disappear. The funny thing is, I don't even like to drink coffee.”

“No, you just like to molest it,” I say.

“Sometimes,” she says, “I make a pot of coffee, just to smell it. I always throw it away. Doesn't it make the air so rich?”

I bury my left hand in the barrel. It's a workout. You can't force it. You have to insinuate yourself, picking aside one layer of beans at a time, tickling them out of the way with your fingertips. My hand keeps slithering and twisting, plunging down and down, fighting through the resistance. Our hands touch halfway down the barrel. I run a forefinger down the soft underside of her thumb. She presses her hand into mine.

“Nabbed,” she says, and peers up at me under the canopy of her eyelids. Watching to see what I'll do next. Daring me.

“Did I catch you, or did you trap me?” I say.

“Maybe,” she says.

“Maybe which?” I say.

“Maybe you should figure it out yourself,” she says.

I pull her mouth into mine. It's a nice long kiss. The loaminess of the coffee smells like something primal, as if every bean has been mined from the center of the earth. It's so thick it's as if we're all alone, hidden or sheltering in a caffeine cloud.

She cancels twice. No reason given. Then she picks a French place on the East Side. The sign over the door says two maggots or something. These French names, they're a little freaky. She's five minutes late. Which in girl time is ten minutes early.

It's a Thursday night in March. Winter is screaming its closing remarks at the door. We get a banquette along the wall in the back room. Go for the steak frites. Shooter say:
Always get the most expensive thing on the menu and insist that she do the same
.

I look around, make a mental note: chick heaven. It's got that we're-trying-really-hard-to-be-French vibe so few places have. The waitresses talk like Pepe Le Pew.

“Steak frites, medium rare,” I tell the waitress.

“
Moi, je prends la même chose,
” Julia says, bundled in her yellow coat.

Memo to self: learn French.

“What ninety-nine St. Émilions do you have?” I ask. Shooter made me memorize this line.

The waitress looks impressed, offers me her fave. I order it without asking for the price. Class. That's me.

“You speak French,” I say.

“Not much,” she says. “I was mostly in it for the naughty words.”

“Julia Brouillard,” I say, tasting the words. “What's that mean?”

“Fog,” she says. “I kind of like it. Makes me feel like I can hide. Alone in my haze. That no one can penetrate.”

“What's Les Deux Magots then? Two maggots?”

“Slang,” she says, already on her second cigarette. “For two ugly guys.”

“So I make you think of ugly guys?”

She laughs. “The one in Paris used to be frequented by Verlaine and Rimbaud.”

“Hey, I know them,” I say. “They're in a Bob Dylan song. ‘Situations have ended sad, relationships have all been bad. Mine have been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud's.' ”

“Uh-huh,” she says, peeling off her coat. A big Irish sweater under it. “From ‘You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.' That's how I got interested in them in the first place.”

“I gather it didn't work out between them,” I say.

“No, they were pretty much doomed,” she says. “Beautifully doomed. It would make a good movie.”

I beat down the urge to make a joke about how Stallone should play Rimbaud.

“Verlaine was married,” she says. “Rimbaud was just a teenager when they met. He was like Verlaine's…Lolita.”

“Now that's a dreamy smile,” I say.

“Can you imagine the power of being Lolita?” she says. “I loved that book.”

I never got around to it. I know it was a big tabloid story in the fifties and all, but “OLD MAN WRITES FILTHY BOOK”? Not so shocking these days, is it? Tabloids, like medicine and rocket science, have moved far beyond what was ever thought possible.

“You never showed me your drawing of yourself the other night,” I say.

“Oh,” she says. A hand flutters automatically to the clasp of her purse. “It was pretty dumb.”

“Ah-ha,” I deduce, all Sherlockian. “You still have it.”

“No,” she says. “Yes.”

“Come on,” I say. “I showed you mine.”

“It's just, stupid,” she says. She takes it out and unfolds it in her lap as the waitress puts our steaks in front of us.

I pick up a fry and look at the picture. Big pointy skyscrapers. They all look like the Chrysler building, daggers stabbing the sky.
They line both sides of the street as a tiny lone cab putters by. Only the buildings look like monsters. They're full of sharp angry angles and they bend together over the street, blocking out the sun. Their windows look like gritted teeth. In the cab a very small, very pretty face looks out the window, looking overwhelmed by it all.

“This you in the cab?” I say.

“I know. It's lame,” she says. “I was trying to be all artsy.”

“I like it,” I say, though I'm not sure that I do. “The New York City visitors bureau could use it in print ads. There are way too many tourists here anyway.”

“I didn't say I could draw,” she says.

“What are you best at?”

“Nothing.”

“I'll bet not.”

“Okay,” she says, conspiratorially. “Just between us? I dance.”

I dance. Are any two words more guaranteed to stoke my engines? Besty used to dance.

“What kind of dance do you do?”

“All of 'em,” she says. “Modern, jazz, ballet. Not tap, though.”

“I'll bet you're beautiful when you dance,” I say.

A shy smile. And then she stands up and peels again. The big sweater down to the hips goes. Underneath it she's wearing an abbreviated skirt with ironic ruffles and a go-to-hell black sleeveless shirt, tight, with a glittery silver heart in the middle. She sits back down, watching me watching her.

“Can I see you dance sometime?”

“Actually,” she says, “we're putting on this recital. In July. It's me, my friend Carla, and some girls from our studio in South Norwalk.”

“I'd like to see it.”

“You,” she says, pointing a fry at me, “should come.”

By the time dinner is over and we've each put away three glasses
of wine, we're getting a little loopy. So we each order another. It tastes like mother's milk. Better, actually. My mother's milk was full of tar and nicotine. I'm liking her so much I haven't even planned any skits.

“So I found a place,” she says.

“In the city?” I say.

The busboy is clearing the table. Suddenly we're almost the only ones here. I look at my watch. Four hours have evaporated.

“It's in Harlem,” she says. “Well, 121st Street. Up by Columbia. I'm moving next weekend.”

“That was fast,” I say.

“Someone I used to work with at the Bridgeport paper needed a roommate,” she says.

“She a friend of yours?” I say.

“It's actually a guy,” she says.

Something in me flinches, something low down. My pancreas does a stutter step, my bile duct farts. But it isn't unusual for people to have roomies of the opposite sex in New York. The housing crunch is permanent here. I could name half a dozen girls I know who have male roommates they aren't involved with. Some of the guys aren't even gay.

“It'll be good to have you in town,” I say.

“I'm excited. The commute was killing. Three hours a day.”

“You'll have lots of fun here,” I say.

“I hope.”

“Come over here,” I say.

“Okay,” she says.

And she gets up and sits next to me on the banquette. We cuddle for a while.

“I need you in arm's reach at all times,” I whisper in her ear.

“Okay,” she says.

“The French,” I whisper, “have this special way of kissing.”

“Oh yeah?” she says.

“
Oui
,” I say. And by the time I'm through kissing her, we are the only customers left in the place. There are about ten waitresses and busboys lingering nearby. The music has changed. Edith Piaf has yielded to “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” At frightening volume. I make faces of outrage and despair. Julia laughs.