My Life in Heavy Metal (15 page)

No. No pass should suffer such sad scrutiny. She senses the slackening of his muscles and slumps onto the couch. It is called a pass because there is a movement of one desire past another. But the desires of this couple sit still as stone and stare down on both of them and the best they can manage is a kind of dour truce.

We should do this again, the consultant says.

Sure, the piano teacher says. I'd like that.

There is a long pause. He doesn't know what to do with this. In his off-site seminars they tell him to attack the lulls, tell a joke, make a comment about the weather. But listening to the sad uncertain timbre of her voice ruins his focus.

Anyway, he says.

Right, she says. Sure.

The young couple at the wedding, the bridesmaid and the groomsman, they have no such difficulties. Not yet. For the moment, they are tongues and tails and hips and hands. The arm of night lowers itself over the rectory, turns the swimming pool into a small blue jewel. They have pressed themselves against the side of a building, tumbled into the shallow end, staggered to the nearest flat surface; her peach chiffon dress is bunched around her thighs, his rented gray suit has split down the middle.

The body, the body, the body. And the dizzy players that spin across this smooth field. They are all of them to be applauded. Nights
are
long. An entire lifetime of long. And the pass, here, now, a merciful lantern which lights the way, softly dims, and drags us toward dream.

She told him: “I am completely naked.”

These were the first words she spoke and they tumbled from her mouth, beautifully shaped, smoothed by an accent which sounded French, but was from farther east, Moscow, so that what he heard was:
Ah im compledly neggid.
Her voice rose slightly, placed emphasis on the third word, as if her nakedness were a gift meant entirely for him, presented without forethought, without the least awareness of the rougher ends to which such declarations can be put.

They were on a thin, hissing phone line. She might have been speaking from fifty years ago. He closed his eyes. And as he did, she slipped into a new kind of nakedness, a nakedness untainted by the body's awful math, restored to classical grace. He saw white breasts, plucked from the white of her chest, her high bottom, the soft furrows of her rib cage. He saw her on tiptoe. He saw her lips make the words in wide, red bands.

He understood that what she said was not intended as titillation, even coy provocation. It was merely a happy coincidence. The phone rang and, in her urgent hope that it be him, she picked the receiver up, forgetting to cover herself, forgetting that she stood, in her apartment, in Moscow, without a stitch of clothing. It was an
act of forgetting, then. And her statement to him, an act of delighted remembrance.

He desired in her this wondrous capacity, no hint of which she had shown him previously, that she would someday grow so accustomed to him, so unembarrassed by her own physicality, that she would forget, and then remember, her own nakedness, that just such a cycle might mark their days together. Hearing her words, he felt transported above shame, above lust and privation. If the moment could be clung to, sustained like a perfect note. Perhaps Moscow was such a place. Perhaps there, such possibilities existed.

He had never visited, had only seen photos: grim, towering statues, wide streets, open squares, and, on the horizon, church spires of the oddest shape, like clumps of wet chocolate drawn to a point. Perhaps Moscow was banked in snow, and perhaps the heat of her pale body, standing beside a window, caused the pane to fog.

But even as this image formed, a second image took shape, of him below her window, outside, staring up. And here, from this vantage point, she grew blurry, obscured not by some trick of condensation, or light or distance, but his own insistent longing.

Hardly any time had passed since she spoke, but now he could not see her at all, not as she had existed before. He felt the hard knock of need, stiffened against himself. He might have reached out, tried to explain to her what was happening, but he didn't understand himself. A singular vision of love was perfecting itself in the singular shape of her. And yet that shape, by its very recognition, was now receding, dissolving, and reemerging as something else, a myth of his own illusive want, a creature with a thatch of glistening pubic hair, a crude mouth, nipples the color of bruises.

Years later he toured the factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It was late and he was the only visitor, and the guide—a young woman
in a severe suit—walked him briskly through each cavernous room. Workers in surgical scrubs scurried to and fro. Steel machines hissed and banged and choked. He watched one dip down and release through invisible apertures a thousand coins of chocolate, then pull away so violently as to bring these to a sharp, liquid point. The process was repeated time and again, a mass production of the inimitable, which seemed to him, in that moment, terribly wrong.

He hadn't loved her in the beginning. He was sure of that. He may never have loved her for more than that one, long-ago moment.

But now, as he watched the spires of Moscow reproduced in miniature, as the guide hustled him along toward a bin with free chocolates, urging him to select one-just-one-now-is-the-moment-sir-
please,
coldly appraising his dazed expression; now, as he staggered toward the bin and obediently removed a piece, as he exited into the frigid parking lot, as he tore at the foil, as the chocolate fell into his mouth through a puff of steamy breath and began at once to seep away; now he recognized that he would never rid himself of the moment. It was insoluble.

He had suffered, without a doubt, one perfect memory which, though misplaced, had never been forgotten. It lived inside him and would continue to do so for the rest of his life, to be reawakened again and again. And so he got into his car and drove on the turn-pike and exited and turned into a field and stopped the car and stepped outside and removed each piece of his clothing and lay down in the banked snow and waited for Moscow—the cold lips of that distant city—to brush his skin.

We were at this party, was the situation. Holden was holding forth on his theory of beauty gradients. “You can't get out of your depth aesthetically,” he said. “You do that and you're done for.”

“I've heard this before,” I said. “I know all this.”

“All men and women are divided along aesthetic lines, see. That's just the way it is. There's maybe twenty, twenty-two such strata. At the top you've got the movie stars and models, okay? Tom Cruise and that skinny bitch he's married to, all those fuckers. Then the soap stars and TV anchors. Then commercial actors, then actual nontelevised attractive people, down to the average, sort of ugly, and at the bottom the real sad cases, cleft palates and the like.”

“Right.” I watched Astrid Miller make her way toward the keg.

“The trick here is that every person recognizes intuitively where they belong on the beauty gradient. This is the first thing you gauge when you walk into a room. Right? It's like: ‘Okay, better than him, worse than him, way better than him.' That's how people know who they're supposed to end up with. It's like that song about Noah:
The animals, they came on, they came on in twosies, twosies.
”

“Wait a sec,” I said. “That's about species. Species of animals.”

Holden tapped his temple. “That's what they
tell
you it's about, man. That song's about who gets fucked by who. That's what that whole thing is
about.
”

“You're so full of shit,” I said.

“If I'm so full of shit, how do you explain Kim Forrest and DeWitt Henderson?” This was Holden's trump card, and he displayed it with a princely fluttering of his hands.

Kim Forrest was the hottest girl at our high school. She had run through most of the varsity captains by sophomore year, but never gone all the way. Then this guy, DeWitt Henderson, transferred to our school. He was droopy-eyed and blond, full of hunky grace. All year they circled each other. And the way we heard the story—a story so often repeated it had become, among our pathetic stratum, a kind of masturbatory liturgy—when they finally hooked up, out behind the old grange silo, Kim came not once, not twice, but four times, and was so dazzled by DeWitt's sexual sangfroid that, lying in his arms afterward, she wept with gratitude.

“You think that happens to anyone other than Henderson?” Holden said. “No way. Kim Forrest was saving herself for the guy who was her match on the beauty gradient. But the whole time she's waiting, see, she's getting more and more lathered up. She's like a bottle of Don Perignon that's been shaken for months, right? So when she finally gets popped—
kaboom.
”

“What about different cultures?” I said. “You gonna tell me the bushmen of the Kalahari lust after Kim Forrest?”

“I didn't say that. You'd probably like it if I did, because you'd probably like a shot at some of that dusty Kalahari pussy. But I'm not saying that. The beauty gradient is a cultural determinant, my friend. But there ain't a culture that's exempt. The whole world, right down to fucking Nashua Point, Iowa, runs on a beauty gradient.”

I knew this well enough. My mother, after all, had once been the most beautiful woman in Nashua. This beauty was what spared her when her mind began to unravel five years ago. She had always been an eccentric, strolling the aisles of the grocery store in her bathrobe, humming tunes in public. It was when she began lighting small fires in the front yard and picketing the phone company that my father sought professional help. He was sickened by her blooming madness. And yet the rest of Nashua treated her gently, like a princess who wanders from her throne and lies down to sleep amid the cows. My own grandparents, who had settled Nashua when it was just corn and fences, refused to acknowledge their daughter's condition. They were astounded when my father left.

“I'm trying to teach you something here,” Holden said. “Just look at the instant case. Look at your pal Astrid.” Astrid was the first girl I had ever kissed, on the spidery blacktop of Palmer elementary. “Astrid's getting herself in trouble right now,” Holden said. “Even as we speak.”

“How's that?”

“She's making a play for Scott Milikan, right?”

“Who says?”

“Everyone knows this. Shit, look at the rack.” Astrid was wearing a red, velvety-type shirt about three sizes too small.

“So?”

“So she's in trouble. Milikan's out of her range. He's at least three, four grades up on the gradient.”

This was true. Astrid, with her chunky frame and underbite, was no match for Milikan. He had a boxy jaw full of boxy teeth and tussled blond hair. Plus, he played soccer. He started ahead of me at sweeper.

“Who says Ast can't get him? She looks good tonight.”

“I'm not saying she can't get him. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, she won't be able to keep him.”

Astrid sipped her beer and laughed. Milikan was a few steps away, pumping the keg, smiling, a man with options.

“Everyone knows Ast is making a play for him, and he knows it too. Don't you doubt it. He's got a few beers in him and he's sizing her up, mostly around the hogans. Sure, Milikan's saying, why the hell not? Problem is, he's not in it for the long haul. Beer can blur the picture, but it can't repaint the lines.”

“What about personality?” I said. “Personality counts for something.”

“Not compared to looks. The only thing that beats looks is power or money. For crying out loud, Tommy, who do you think is getting laid in this country? Are you, my friend, in the great scheme of things, getting laid? No, you're getting various hues on
le palette de blue balls.
You know who's getting laid? Rock musicians. Politicians. Athletes. Why? Why are these men getting laid? Why are these often very ugly men getting laid? Because they've got at least two of the magic three. Dennis Rodman? You think anyone wants to fuck him if he's not Dennis Rodman? Bono? Bono is dog meat. Who fucked Bono before he was Bono? No one, that's who. Ugly chicks, maybe.”

Astrid had left the keg. She was off somewhere, powdering something. Milikan was talking to another girl.

“And I must tell you, my friend, this is good sex we're talking about. Don't delude yourself into thinking the prime studage of this country is having substandard sex. No siree. They are having pornquality, multi-gasm sex. They have fucked so many women, and women are so delighted to be fucking them, so moist at the idea of being part of the imprimatur, that these guys are getting hummers.
These women, when they suck these guys off, they're humming. Like the seven dwarfs. Humming while they work.”

“The dwarfs whistled.”

Holden and I had been best friends forever, though that was going to change soon because I was going East for college, while Holden—who was probably twice as smart as I was—was taking summer-school classes. He hoped to get his diploma in time to maybe enroll at Foothill, the local community college.

Milikan finally surrendered the keg, and I went to get more beer.

I felt a hip nudge me.

“Hey,” I said.

Astrid showed me her lovely underbite. “Hey yourself.”

“You look great.”

“Oh Tommy. How sweet!” She gave me an exuberant little hug. You could tell she was sloshed. “How's the philosopher?”

“Oh, you know. As full of shit as ever.”

Astrid smiled and I could see a lipstick stain on one of her front teeth. She glanced over my shoulder. Milikan was behind me, talking with this little blond, a sophomore. Astrid hugged me again and stumbled off toward Milikan.

“That looked enjoyable.” Holden sniffed at me. “Did she spray you?”

“Drink your beer.”