Sweet Talk (9 page)

“No, that word is infestation.”

“You have a yeast infection?”

“No, I don’t.” I am thirty-one years old and have never had a yeast infection or cystitis. I also never have had gonorrhea, syphilis, or an abortion. I have a checkup once a year and am a healthy specimen. I bend close to the small curve of the woman’s ear and say, “I have”—and here my voice drops away altogether as I feel the loathsome word scraping along the back of my throat—“I have the crubs.”

“CRUBS? You have CRUBS?” She is perplexed, then amused. She smiles, unsure whether I have intentionally made a joke or am one of those patients the medical people like to laugh about on their coffee breaks—uneducated women who cannot name their parts and say “bajiva” instead of “vagina,” or rich women who say they got the clap from the cleaning woman who brought germs to the bathroom. “I have the crubs,” I say again, this time as loudly as the receptionist, because now everyone in the waiting room has already heard it anyway, and the doctors will be told, and the nurse practitioners, and the med techs and the janitors. Suddenly I can imagine the lice down there building a new life for themselves in the wilderness of my pubic hair, clearing the forests, planting farms, and sending east for a spinster schoolteacher. “I have the crubs,” I say. “And I need help now.”

• • •

“Well, at least you know nobody’s going to have any sex for the next few days,” Lila says. We are resting at the edge of the apartment pool between our laps. I admire Lila’s slender, muscular legs and think that Susu would pay ten thousand dollars for those legs if the surgeons in Italy could figure out a way to make them. It is early evening, the water is cool, the oleanders are still in bloom, there is a fragrance of invisible eucalyptus trees in the air, and behind the apartment building, the red sunlight billows like sheet silk. This is not a bad life.

“My first husband’s ex-wife was just like her,” Lila says. “She had lots of affairs but always went back to him in between to be told that she was still a desirable woman.”

“You think this could go on indefinitely?” I have a vision of Harvey and me seated at a candlelit table twenty years from now in one of his small Gothic houses, and in from the kitchen comes Susu with her large Italian breasts and a nose that is beginning to slide out of place like an old boxer’s.

“Maybe she’ll marry a plastic surgeon,” Lila says.

We look up toward Harvey’s lighted kitchen window, where Susu is preparing supper. Harvey is bent over the dining table like a willow tree, while Susu stands by the counter like a box hedge. “I think the time has come for me to have a little talk with the happy couple,” I say.

• • •

Susu’s meal for the three of us consists of a packaged spaghetti dinner and, on the side, some slices of canned pineapple decorating small bowls of cottage cheese. “Look what Susu did,” Harvey says, giving me a cautious glance.

“How nice, Susu. Did you learn this in Italy?”

Susu laughs as we sit down at the table. That is one good thing about her: she can usually take a joke.

“Susu was always a rotten cook, wasn’t I, sweetie?” Susu says to Harvey. Why does she have that coy way of referring to herself in the third person, as if she’s a character even in her own life?

“Really, this is great,” Harvey says. I see that he has decided to discuss this meal at length in order to avoid more delicate topics. “Would you believe that she did all this in only twenty minutes?”

Already he is halfway through his meal, and I realize once again that this is a Harvey I have not seen much of in the nine months since I dented the side of his car. This is a Harvey who is attracted to food largely because it is fuel, and whose heart is gladdened as much by the sight of the kind that comes pulpy from a can as by my own aromatic sauce, simmered for hours with fresh herbs. In the last two weeks I have discovered that Harvey really cannot tell the difference between scrambled eggs and a soufflé or between Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and the kind I make from scratch.

“No wonder you’re so thin,” Susu says to me. “You’re not eating anything.”

“Maybe I need some silicone implants,” I say, and I am just mean and small enough to feel a thrill of pleasure when Susu looks back at her plate without smiling. Harvey gives me a warning look. Susu, I must remember, is not playing with a full deck this week. Apparently, this is her best culinary effort, and it has been offered as a peace token—Susu, the repentant crab-carrier trying to make amends with the other woman.

“I was never pretty,” she says. “I always had these big hips and no breasts to go with them. Not like you, Angelina. You have a nice compact little figure.”

“Yes, you do,” Harvey says to me. “And you have one, too. Both of your figures have always been very nice.”

“You always lie,” Susu says. “You lie to make everybody feel good about you.”

That is not true. In fact, Harvey never lies. He is simply one of those people who rarely perceive an inadequacy in another person. Right now I can see the old guilt resurrecting itself as I watch Harvey watching Susu over a shaker of Kraft cheese and a plate of soft white bread. He is about to take the blame once again for the failure of the marriage. I can see the tenderness in his eyes, the pity that will cause him to offer Susu a place to stay for weeks and weeks if that’s how long it
takes her to find a job. She begins to cry, and Harvey reaches out to touch her hand.

“Now come on,” he says in his beautiful voice.

“Excuse me,” I say, although no one is listening. I leave the apartment and go back over to Lila’s.

“He was always a sucker for the basket cases,” she says. “After her he went out with a sculptress who had had shock treatment and who used to send him obscene, jealous postcards at the office. Then he took up with a woman who ate only fruit and nuts and liked to throw drinks on other women at parties.”

“Don’t you ever want to get married again?” I say. “Don’t you want to move into a little house with daffodils pushing up along the front walk in the spring?”

“Listen, I have thousands of dollars’ worth of antiques and a good job. Things could be worse. I could be in love with a man like Harvey.”

Every Sunday night Harvey and I watch the science program on the PBS channel. Tonight we are watching it on Harvey’s bed with the door closed and the volume turned up high, so that we cannot be overheard by Susu, who is pretending to read foreign-language fashion magazines in the next room.

“She’s actually a sweet person,” he says. “She’s having a hard time thinking about her future.”

“How can she think with a hairdo like that? Her brain never gets any light or air.”

“Please,” he says. “Please, please, please.”

Last week’s topic on the PBS program was atoms and quarks. This week the program is about the miracles of microphotography. Harvey and I watch with genuine fascination as a lens focuses on a human eyelid and magnifies it fifty thousand times to reveal that there are tiny, fish-shaped mites living between the hairs. The announcer says that these mites live on everyone.

“See,” says Harvey. “We already had things living on our bodies.”

In the next scene, the amazing lens focuses on a piece of ordinary bedroom carpet to reveal that in between the fibers there are thousands of living dust mites, each much smaller than the head of a pin. These dust mites, the announcer explains, are in all our homes. They subsist entirely on the cells of sloughed-off human skin. Harvey gets down on the floor and crawls around the bed on his hands and knees. He rests his chin on the sheets by my foot. “Skin,” he murmurs and kisses my little toe.

“We can’t do anything before Monday or Tuesday,” I say, really just as a test of how much he wants me. “We all have to give our bodies another chemical shampoo before we’re safe.”

He moves his head along my leg and kisses the inside of my thigh. “We can fool around,” he says.

“Hello, hello,” a voice says from the other side of the door. “Anybody alive in there?
Les personae morte?
”

“What language is it speaking?” I say.

Harvey crawls to the door and opens it a crack. “I can’t find the detergent,” Susu says to me. “What’s the matter with him?”

“Harvey is a dust mite.”

“He was always like this, you know. So neat you could never find even the most common thing.”

“Back in a second,” Harvey says as he stands up and steps into the hall. I notice that he shrewdly leaves the door open so that I can monitor the search for the soap. But Susu drops the subject of detergent as soon as they reach the kitchen and begins to tell another one of her third-person stories about life in Italy. In this one Susu goes riding on the beach on the Riviera although she has never been on a horse before. “So there goes Susu in her bikini and there goes Greggie galloping ahead of me.” I wonder whether Greggie is the one with the insect problem. On television the dust mites stand like tiny armadillos among colossal strands of shag carpet. In the kitchen Susu’s horse kneels toward the beach because he wants to take a sand bath. “ ‘
Mi scuzi
,’ I say to the Italians. I think the horse is dying. ‘Help, help!’ ” In this anecdote, Susu is the silly, helpless person who needs to be protected. I hear Harvey’s deep laugh, and I close the door and turn off the television. I get in bed as I hear Susu say, “Yes, I did, I did.” I put the pillow over my head. “I did. It was unbelievable.”

I stretch over Harvey’s part of the bed and think of the dust mites alive all over the room. There must be whole families of them, generations and generations, living off the great god Harvey as his cells float through the air like manna. Probably after these last nine months a few colonies of Angelinites have sprung up, too. I wonder whether different species have grown dependent on different tastes—cells flavored by spaghetti sauce, or spilled alcohol, or chocolate syrup, perfumed cells from breasts and inner thighs—Chanel No. 5, L’Air du Temps, Heaven Scent—creamed cells from hands and faces, cells lathered thick with lipstick (these would be Susu’s cells), and maybe right now a whole race of dust mites is dividing itself into small communities and setting out in covered wagons for more fertile shag, and the community that has been subsisting on Pond’s Dry Skin Cream begins to die out when I switch, arbitrarily, to another brand. I can imagine the dust-mite priests down there pleading for cells saturated with lanolin, cornstarch, rosewater, building little fires, chanting beads, trying to make do with Oil of Olay cells, to which they are allergic.

“
Andiamo
,” says Susu as I gallop toward sleep.

It is 7
A.M
. on Monday morning, and Susu’s underwear blooms around the bathroom like California poppies. There are scarlet-orange bras hanging from the towel
racks, each bra cup stitched in concentric circles meant to suggest a target. There are scarlet-orange panties—some with cut-out crotches—dripping their color along the plastic of the shower curtain. And in the tub and sink there is more underwear seeping mauve into the sudsy water.

“Where are the whips, Harvey?” I say when he comes to stand behind me in the doorway. “Where are the chains?”

He laughs. “I thought she was doing this stuff last night.”

“This does not look to me like the underwear of Emily Dickinson,” I say.

“Shh,” he says, still laughing. “She’ll hear you.”

“For God’s sake, it’s seven o’clock in the morning,” I say loudly. “Please tell Miss Frederick’s of Hollywood we would like to take a shower.”

“Here is Miss Frederick’s in person,” Susu says, stepping between us into the bathroom. “Please excuse Miss Frederick’s if she has to wash the lice out of her clothes before she goes to her job interview.”

“Everybody’s been excusing you for two weeks,” I say. “When are you leaving?”

“Maybe we could all go into the kitchen and have some coffee,” Harvey says.

“I gave you the only three thin years I ever had in my life,” Susu says to Harvey. “And what did you give me in return? You gave me lice.”

I look at Harvey. “You had lice when you were married?” Harvey looks away.

“He gave me lice last week,” Susu says and sits on the edge of the tub.

“He couldn’t have given you lice,” I say. “He gave them to me.” But somewhere in the back of my head a camera lens is panning the landscape of my life, and a tree is no longer a tree but a place where other lives and whole worlds will be revealed if the eye looks closely enough at what’s under the bark.

Susu begins to cry. “I had to put up with this for years,” she says. “You think you’re so special? You think you’re the only signorina on the block?”

“I suppose now we’re going to have to hear a story about the virgin birth of the crabs,” I say. I feel that all my good qualities—restraint, perceptiveness, and the ability to handle bad luck—are being stripped away in a violent wind, and I am trying to hold everything together with a joke. I look toward Harvey, but he has slipped into another room. I sit on the edge of the tub and lean against the wet shower curtain. “It was my pal Lila,” I say. “Wasn’t it?”

Here is what I do at work: I make small houses, office buildings, even airports. I also make streets, trees, shrubs, flower beds, ponds, streams, and miniature people. I work for a large group of architects, creating three-dimensional mock-ups of their designs. Harvey
still talks about leaving the firm and going into business for himself. Lila is thinking about going back to graduate school in art history. Susu sells real estate but would rather have a job in broadcasting. I am the only person I know happy at work, except for a writer I met the other night at a party. He has pale green eyes and hair so thick it makes me think his brain must be a very fertile place. His name is Anthony, which is the name of the patron of lost things. An irony, since he owns so few of the things the rest of us seem to regard as necessities. He lives in a one-room apartment furnished in someone else’s taste.

“I think he lives in his head,” I tell Lila. “I think in his head he owns stereo sets and three-piece suits and takes trips to Mexico in the winter.” Lila and I are sitting on one of her Persian carpets near a cherry cabinet full of beaded antique purses. It’s been two months since I stopped seeing Harvey, and now Lila and I are having drinks to demonstrate that we are still friends, as indeed we are. If I could choose to be someone else I might actually choose to be Lila, who is smart and beautiful, and whom everybody likes, but who seems to have found a way to close the door of this museum of an apartment and ignore the mucky terrain over which the rest of us must walk. For me the closed door is my work, where I create a stationary world, ageless and colorful, a shopping center or school no bigger than the top of a desk, and completely manageable.