My Life in Heavy Metal (10 page)

The Don squinted. “Make your own way in the world, that it?”

“Why shouldn't I make my own way in the world? Shit. Isn't that what you're doing? One day at a time. Find what you love. Don't I have the right to do that?” It was his look that bothered me, as if
I
was the fool, as if I were the one screwing up.

“Okay, Pancho. Settle down.”

I rose to my full height and looked down on the The Don, his lousy fading widow's peak. “Don't tell me to settle down. Fuck. You sound like my fucking dad.” The Don said nothing. He stared into his drink. “Say something,” I said. “Say one fucking thing. Jesus. What a phony. You're the one who got that girl pregnant. You're the one who, who should be thinking about his responsibilities. I'm still young. I can dream whatever I want.”

The Don was quiet now. He reached across the bar and poured himself another; the whiskey rippled under the lights. He took a sip and stared at me for a long moment and I still loved him in that moment, though I didn't want to.

“It's one thing to have dreams,” he said slowly. “And another to chase them down. Listen to me, Pancho. I know some things. Go back to where you belong.” The play had gone out of his voice. There was something even hard there, a kind of contempt I'd not heard before.

I wasn't crying exactly but my breathing was wet and my throat hurt. I tried to make a funny face, like he was just a clown yakking
away. But The Don held his stare. “You ever been in this place in February? Have you, Pancho? It's like a fucking morgue, okay? Not a movie set. A fucking morgue. Where the dead stay. You hear me?”

I took another sip, to dull my throat. “What happened with that girl?” I said. “Peck says you knocked her up.”

The Don looked away. “
Knocked her up.
Some bartender you'll make. Is that the kind of language your parents taught you? Is it?”

“What happened?”

“It's a complex situation,” he said softly.

“What's so complex? Is she pregnant or not?”

The Don's jaw clenched and unclenched. “Oh for Chrissake!” he snarled. “What business is this of yours, anyway? You're not my father, or my fucking kid. You're just some rich brat slumming for a summer. What gives you the right?” He looked off toward the ocean, as if waiting for something to transpire above the black waves.

I could see now that The Don wanted me out of his life; wanted an escape from the expectations I heaped upon him. “Listen,” he said finally, “you're my main man, okay? You're my guy, Pancho. If I'd gotten that girl—Jesus—don't you think I'd tell you? You're the first guy I'd tell. You listen to me, all right? I know some things.” He drained his drink and smiled. “Let's just lock this dump up, okay?”

I began frisking my pockets for the keys. “Shit,” I said. I looked down the bar, checked beside the register, twice, and all along the sideboards. I rooted around behind the bar on my hands and knees. My first week closing solo and I'd managed to fuck up.

Somewhere above me I could hear The Don's laughter, sawing away. “Looking for these?” he said. From his cape he drew my key ring, chunky with dutiful silver, and swirled the loop around his fingers, one to the next, like a gymnast on the rings.

“Thanks, asshole,” I said. Outside the sky spattered on, the hotels shuttered, the strip shut down, drained of its spruce, the amusement park a failing endeavor already, the arms and legs of the rides frozen in the dark. Past the piers, the lighthouse stood on a bluff, facing the ocean like a prop.

“You should go home,” The Don said. He hesitated a moment, then tossed me the keys and took up the whiskey bottle. With great care, he filled his flasks and placed them in their velvet belt loops. Then he picked up his tumbler and hurled it at the pickled-egg jar, missing badly. “I've always hated those things,” he said. “They stink like the ocean,” he said. “I'll sweep that up. Sorry.”

We heard a lot of things about The Don later. That he'd been killed by the Romas, his skull dashed on the breakers. That he'd been forced to marry the girl, held at gunpoint during the ceremony, and moved with her to Cleveland. That he'd nicked a diamond from Big Marek, one of the Russians, and wound up in Sing Sing.

This was the apocrypha of Don Viktor, stories told to fill the long pauses of autumn. However it went, he knew the time had come for him to return to who he was. It took me a bit longer, plunging, as I was, through youth's dizzy cycles of ignorance and want. Who could have known, then, that I couldn't be anything I imagined?

Years later, the casinos would go up and light the walk forever, blinding everything. The papers still carry items from time to time about some lost gull crashing into a marquee. Every night, the place draws slot zombies and card counters by the thousands, the amateur escape artists of our age, garish and hope-drunk, as if the fairy-tale kiss of fate might change their lives forever.

I was only beginning to understand fairy tales on the night The Don hurled his glass and flew off. I was still mesmerized by his belief, by the myth of reinvention, as were his women, his many women, though fewer, probably, than in my memory. With The Don, when he returns to me now, he is always in that seaside bar: the warm summer fog and the smell of lemon rinds and gin and the lights soft upon closing and Gloria Apodoca folded into his cape, her lips red along his neck as they dance their last slow tango. In this version of my life, The Don looks up drowsily, winks, winks at
me,
a sweet bird of beauty winging new toward love.

This was just before my thirtieth birthday. I was in graduate school, of all places. I had no idea why. None of us did. We were extremely well spoken rubber duckies. You could push us in any one direction and we would flounder on forever. Sometimes, in the drowsy winter hallways, my conscience would rear up and remind me I was dumb with luck. Other times, I wished they'd turn the whole place into a homeless shelter.

But the day I'm talking about was early spring. The callery pears were in blossom, thousands of tiny white camisoles. I was out in front of the Comp Lit compound with Legget, watching the undergrads. We were vaguely aware of the distinctions between them. Mostly, they were tan calves drifting past.

A woman entered my field of vision from the right. She had the plumpest cheeks I'd ever seen. Her eyes were pinched at the corners, and blue patches stood out below them. She looked as if she hadn't slept in a year. Every other woman I could think of seemed stingy and coarse and obvious by comparison. She waved timidly at Legget.

“You like that, do you?” he said.

“Who is she?”

“She's in my French class.” Legget stubbed out his cigarette. “Polish, I think.”

“What's her name?”

“Don't know,” Legget said. “She doesn't say much.”

For the next week, I walked around babbling about The Polish Woman. “You know me,” I said. “I don't gawk. I'm not a gawker.” This was more or less true. Somewhere in the mid-twenties it dawned on me that female beauty didn't require any encouragement from me. Female beauty was doing just fine on its own. But I couldn't get this woman out of my head.

Legget diagnosed sexual infatuation.

“Can't I just have an aesthetic experience?” I said. “Like spotting a rare species, a species you might see once and never again, for the rest of your life?”

“Spare me,” Legget said.

Two months later, in the computer lab, a woman in a white blouse swept into the seat next to mine. “Is it all right?” she said. Her accent was excruciating: the burred diphthongs of Russian, the sulky lilt of French. My heart did a little arpeggio.

“You're Polish,” I said.

She turned and there was her face again. Her lips drew together, as if stung by some impending calamity. “Yah. How do you know?”

I explained about Legget. She nodded slowly.

“Do you like Kosinski?” I said.

“Oh yah!” she said. “Have you read
Painted Bird
?”

“Sure,” I said. “Wow. It's hard to find anyone who's read Kosinski.” This was true. I myself, for instance, had not read Kosinski, though I'd heard he was quite good. “What a writer!” I said. “What sentences!” On and on I went until, finally, at a loss for what to say next, I asked for her phone number.

She looked at me for a few seconds—I was in my teaching uniform, a rumpled white button-down and khakis—then wrote her name on a piece of paper:
Basha.

“I don't do this normally,” I said. “But, I mean, I really love Kosinski.”

And then she was standing on the median of Summit Avenue, lit up inside a beige windbreaker. She looked elegant and chimerical: the head of a lioness, the body of a swan. At dinner I choked on my chicken korma. That was just for starters. I got lost on the way to the theater. I misplaced my wallet, and had to race home to get cash. We were twenty minutes late to the movie—a British drawing-room melodrama—and sat in the darkened theater trying to figure out who was doomed and who fated. I spent most of the time smelling Basha, glancing at her profile, my fingers greasy with popcorn.

The amateur psychologists in the crowd will perhaps sense the significance of the lost wallet:
The subject subconsciously enacts a fantasy in which he is stripped of his identity through a powerful, exotic love.

To which I would respond:
Doy hickey.

I was ravenous for a love so grandiose as to obliterate my life. Most every relationship I'd formed in the past five years had gone south: romantic entanglements, friendships, professional alliances. One friend referred to me as a train wreck. Another suggested “emotional atom bomb” as perhaps closer to the mark. The ones I couldn't scare away, I managed to drive off over some perceived slight. I was the world's welterweight champion of the silent feud. I didn't see it that way, of course. People just kept letting me down. It never occurred
to me that I sought out rejection, engineered the drama of fresh grievances to distract me from older, stale forms of grief.

But that's not the story I'm telling now. No one—except those paid to listen—really wants to hear your musty songs of self-contempt. What we want is the glib aria of disastrous love, which is, finally, the purest expression of self-contempt.

Her full name was Basha Sabina Olszewska. She pronounced her last name beautifully: Olshevska. It meant something like a birch tree, she said. I thought of Frost: the pale trunk, the quick fire. She came from Katowice, an industrial city in the west of Poland. She hoped to become a translator. English was her fifth language.

She had a sense of humor as well. Imagine. She told me a story about dining with the Dean of Students at a welcoming banquet for exchange students. “They brought him steak,” she said. “I couldn't believe the size, David. It was like a car tire. Everyone was quiet for a second and just at that minute I turned to him and said: ‘You have such a huge meat!'”

This story thrilled me, its slapstick reference to the male part. Basha knew what a cock was! She understood the great harmless joke that all cocks come to in the end. And this idea, however improbably, led to the idea that she might touch my cock.

We were eating at my place. She was sitting there at my table, daintily cutting her chicken. I told stories about my life that suggested—far less subtly than I supposed—what a terrific guy I was. I cleared her plate and took it to the sink. Wasn't I the disarmingly liberated bachelor type? She stood. I stepped in front of her and let my face fall forward. She executed a brisk little sidestep. My lips
smeared the side of her cheek. A pinecone fell from the tree outside, striking the roof with a soft thud, as if to close the subject.

Later, standing outside her dorm, I said: “Will I ever get to kiss you?”

Her lips pursed, like a waiter who is out of the most popular item on the menu. The light fell across her in frets. “Such an American question!” She told me about some Finnish jerk she'd fallen for first term. And now she was returning to Poland and felt too vulnerable—the word seemed to swirl around her tongue—to get involved.

To which I wanted to say: involved? Who needs
involved
?

This was one of the advantages of age. I'd been rejected enough times to understand that prudence meant little in the face of sustained negotiation. Virtue was a better guide, all things considered. You could maybe depend on virtue. But a guy like me, with my wonderful rage, my American case of Manifest Destiny, I wasn't about to back down from a little prudence. “Sure,” I said. “I understand. I hope we can still be friends.”

Basha was so relieved at my grace, she gave herself to me. She needed the help of a large bottle of inexpensive sauvignon blanc, which disappeared down her throat, cup by cup, while I watched in cautious rapture. It seemed terribly important that I do nothing to startle her. Slowly, perceptibly, my kitchen grew warm with the promise of contact. I can't recall a word that passed between us. There was only the wine, my silence, her mouth fixing to the rim of her cup, the slight, glottal pull of her underlip against and away from its surface, her white throat reaching up, descending.

We kissed and she smiled, her lips turning back on themselves. Her teeth were faintly discolored, as if she'd had a quick bite of ashes. I had never seen the classic Slavic facial structure at such close quarters. When she laughed her cheeks rose with the strange, graceful bulk of glaciers and her eyes became Mongol slashes. Frowning, her face took on the milky petulance of a Tartar princess. Even at rest, impassive, her face expressed the severe emotions I associated with true love, which I had always known to be exquisite and doomed and slightly stylized.

I felt the pleasing thickness of her, damp beneath her garments. We were on my mattress, yanking off clothes. She had narrow shoulders, tiny budded breasts. Her arms and belly were robed in baby fat.