Negatives
Allston James
It had been one of those things that happen at dinner parties right
toward the end when someone who has tired of the conversational drift
comes up with a directional change that nearly always leaves at least two
people in remorse the next morning. “OK, everyone. Your single most
dishonest moment. What am I bid?”
“Jonah,” his wife intoned, her fork resting between finger and
thumb in the graceful manner of a violinist’s bow, tines arcing directly
toward her husband’s heart. “I don’t think this is a game you should play.”
The other attorney at the table, Charles Granger, Jonah’s law partner,
winked broadly at the rest of us then turned his attention to his Merlot.
Behind him, beyond the wind-rattled panes of our Victorian’s bay windows,
an oil tanker made its way west between Alcatraz and the cityfront, the
ship’s red port lights bright as rubies though a half-mile away. I was with
Mary on this one. I’m not particularly prescient but obvious trouble usually
has a way of announcing itself to me in clear, uncertain terms.
“Jonah,” I began. “You know and I know you can take the most
sterling, upright man, woman or beast in America and with almost no effort
recast him her—”
“That’s bullshit, Barry, an utter bullshit dodge. I just think it would
be interesting to see who comes up with the choicest morsel of crookedness.
Hey, it might be me, for chrissakes. Probably would be. We’re not talking
about, what’d you say? ‘Recasting’? One historic smudge ain’t gonna bring
anybody down. Hey, pal, we’re professionals all. And friends?”
“Bullshit?” I chuckled. “I think not. You can say it’s play but . . . it
almost never is. I’ve been here before.”
“Sweetheart, don’t get too heavy on us here,” Darien said, lighting
a cigarette. The others went silent, sidelining.
“Look,” I said, “it works like this, Jonah. We’d all reveal some
essentially dishonest little thing we’ve done, in whatever realm, then we’d
part company, say our goodnights and then you’d be cruising over the
Gate to Marin and reaching forward to turn down the CD player and you’d
say to Mary,” who I could tell from her half-smile was already ahead of
me, “ ‘You know, darling, I never thought Barry—or Nancy—was capable
of such a thing, did you? Wow. . .’
“You’re paranoid, Barry. You’ve been working at that newspaper
too long.” Jonah’s tone had down-shifted a couple of notches south of
spirited play.
“Maybe he has,” Darien said, cradling my arm in hers, having
pulled her chair around next to me. “But I think it’s true. We put stuff out
there and there’s no retrieving it, like your judges telling juries to pretend
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they haven’t heard certain testimony?” she grimaced. “I mean, if I confessed
to having once shoplifted say, a silver dessert fork from Gump’s, how
could you simply pretend to not know that?”
“Did you really ? Nancy asked in feigned horror. I never dreamed
you could thieve!”
“I’m impressed,” Charles added, raising his glass in salute.
“See! It could actually be an enhancer,” Jonah cried, rising from
his chair in victory.
“Jonah,” Darien said resignedly, “since it’s your idea and none of
the rest of us seems to have much stomach for it, why don’t you go ahead
and run a solo by us.” Her even, laser-to-the-marrow marketing tone sucked
out whatever air remained in the lawyer’s balloon.
“To what end? I mean, the life of the thing would lie in the, the
comparative. Otherwise, it’d just be—”
“Jerking off?”
“Thanks, Mary. No, it’s just that it wouldn’t have any value. Hell,
I can’t help it if the rest of you are paranoids.”
“There’s that word again,” Mary smiled, the candlelight catching
her perfectly.
“Dear Jonah,” Darien said, getting up to tend to the Booze.
“Sometimes being paranoid just means having all the facts.”
The acrid smoke of mild tension dissipated by dessert. Nancy, a
systems analyst down the peninsula in Cupertino, had seemed
contemplative during the entire evening, removed yet keenly attuned to
what was going on. Darien’s roommate from their days at Mills College,
she had a knack for avoiding foolish table talk without being rude. In front
of the fireplace after dinner, I almost asked her what she had thought of
Jonah’s proposal but thought better of it, not wanting to reopen the issue,
although of all those at the table, her deceit was the one that would have
most interested me, a manifestation, I knew, of my long -range, low-grade
infatuation.
Everyone left around one and Darien and I stood outside on the
deck for a while, admiring without comment how the fog had ensnared
just the upper reaches of Telegraph Hill, Coit Tower now a dull, veiled and
huddled presence in its halogen floods. Darien kissed me full-lipped just
below my ear and went inside to bed. I lit and smoked one of the two or
three cigarettes I allow myself per month, some small rebellion linked to
the fact that I had tried a similar rationing with scotch two years before but
to negligible effect and ended up jettisoning alcohol altogether, so now it
had come down to this pair of Marlboro Lights each month. It’s not the
sort of denial I’d pay a therapist a hundred dollars an hour to sort through.
Jonah’s proposal. I’d been very close to accepting it. In fact, the
prospect had sent my heart racing there at the table even as I objected,
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dismantling his plan. Why? That’s what I was sifting through out on the
deck that late night in San Francisco. Things had been tense between Darien
and me for quite a while, enough so that even the faintest affection, the
way she had taken my arm in hers there at dinner, seemed to underline
how far we’d fallen, as if the tenderness was now an affront to the distancing
rather than the reverse. Although we were not admitting it out loud, we
both knew we had allowed ourselves to drift past the point of no return.
We had arrived at the place, actually, where any new transgression or
disappointment, however seemingly inconsequential, would work in
concert with the old to finally bring the thing crashing down.
And that’s the realization, pure and simple, that was upon me when
Jonah presented his asinine idea. I was feeling that primitive, awful and
splendid thing, that invocation to set fire to the house that no longer shelters.
And there on the wall, just above where Jonah had been sitting, rested just
the right opportunity, simply but elegantly framed in pale triple-matte
linen—a photographic portrait of photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, the left
side of his face, from eye to chin, oddly out of focus, the result of his or the
photographer’s sudden movement. It was not an especially arresting
portrait. I can’t recall anyone other than Darien, whom I’d given it to on a
birthday while we were dating, asking who had taken the picture, and
when she had asked, I had lied.
I’d had to lie because to tell the truth would have required
admission of bigger lies, deceptions whose greater portions hung on the
opposite wall, just above where Nancy had been seated at dinner. There, in
smaller but more ornate gilt frames, were three fanciful nudes in gouache,
three women in pale yellows, paler blues, each signed by Pablo Picasso.
These small works were linked to the photographic portrait across from
them in a way that charged the very air of the room.
Toward the end of his career, Alfred Eisenstaedt was scheduled to
speak and present slides of his life’s work at the University of Georgia,
where years before, I was attending graduate school, working on a masters
in journalism. I overheard staff discussing the photographer ’s travel
arrangements and quickly volunteered to meet his plane in Atlanta. Walking
back to my apartment that afternoon, I realized that I was at the gateway of
one of those moments of predestined clarity. An amateur photographer,
the prospect of sharing a private one-on-one car ride with a grandmaster
like Eisenstaedt was almost too much to think about and I jealously kept
the news to myself. On the way to the airport, I reached behind me and
stuffed my Canon and lens cases under a jacket on the floor. Would you
want sheet music on your backseat if you were picking-up Mozart?
All those faces. Churchill, Sophia Loren. I projected them onto the
gray weathered sides of abandoned sharecropper shacks along the twolane state highway leading from Athens to Atlanta. Simone Signoret up
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there above the Coke sign, the sheer weight of prospect displacing reality,
the late afternoon October drizzle impregnating the north Georgian
landscape, casting it in sepia, causing it to stand still.
I met Alfred Eisenstaedt at the gate, recognizing him right away
from the university’s press release. I took his leather carry-on and a black
accordion envelope that he asked I handle with care. After picking-up his
two checked bags, we made our way to the parking lot and headed east.
He was a beautiful man, gracious, appreciative to have a “chauffeur,” as he
put it with a smile. In the dim twilight, there wasn’t much in the way of
sightseeing for him on the way back, although his eyes seemed to be
searching for something out there in the pines and far up the long red-clay
country lanes that snaked north and south away from the highway like
ribs from a spine. I was committed to restricting myself to one question
about photography but seeing his fatigue and unstated desire for silence, I
didn’t ask that one. He had arrived in Georgia after returning from London
and Europe just two days before, just stopping-off in New York for a night.
“Are you a photographer?” he asked, neatly folding his hands in
his lap.
“No, not really. I mean I have a camera, but—”
“Just one?”
“Well, actually two, a—”
“Sell one or give it away to someone who hasn’t got one. A camera,”
he continued, pausing. “You only need one. Of the one hundred images I
will show tomorrow at your university, all taken over a period of many,
many years, I think almost all of them were taken with one camera. . . .
Young photographers today are too concerned with cameras and not
pictures.”
With that he excused himself in the politest terms and asked if I
would mind his taking a “small nap.” He rested his head against the cold
doorframe of my Saab, sleeping soundly all the way back to Athens. I drove
extra cautiously to preserve his sleep, finally waking him when we reached
his hotel near the university.
I can’t tell you about the slide presentation the next day because
on the way back to my apartment that night, I was involved in a three-way
accident that deposited me in the local ER with a punctured lung, several
broken ribs and a fractured shoulder. Dr. Ford, my thesis advisor, stopped
by the hospital at week’s end to reassure me about my classes. As for the
Saab, worth less than a quarterly insurance premium before the accident, it
was now totaled, “so beat to shit,” according to Peter Jacobs, a friend who
went to the garage to remove my belongings, that it was impossible to
retrieve the camera and lenses. “Thing looks more like public sculpture
than a car, man.”
When I returned to school, Dr. Ford told me he had received a
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telephone call from a Brenda Schaefer in New York, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s
personal assistant. He had lost a folder somewhere between Europe,
London, New York, and possibly Georgia, and she was backtracking hotels,
airlines and anyone else who might help. I telephoned her and said that he
had had such a folder with him when I picked him up in Atlanta. In my
mind’s eye, I conveyed to her, I could see him tucking it underneath his
arm as we got into the car but that I couldn’t be absolutely sure. Why do
we remember these things, I asked out loud. The string securing the
envelope folder’s flap was canary yellow.
Nine months later, I was deep into my thesis research, glad to be
finished with classes and savoring the slowed down cadence of campus
and town as summer began.
“Is this Mr. O’Meara? Barry O’Meara?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Connie Rollins over at T and T’s Garage?” She spoke in
Deep South up-speak, statements formed as questions. “Your wreck last
year?”
“My what?”
“You had a wreck last year?”
“Yes?”
“Well, we found a folder of stuff when we were cleanin’ out our
filing cabinets last week and it had a towing receipt with your name on it?
So, I can’t be sure but my guess is it got lost when your car was towed in...”
The rest of what she said went by me like a slow motion lightning
bolt, and I recalled the folder that Alfred Eisenstaedt misplaced.
Shitalmighty, he would be happy. Maybe I’d fly directly to New York to
hand-deliver it—private journal, personal papers or whatever it might be.
T and T’s was your basic bombed-out kudzu vision of failed
Southerness, complete with what you could safely guess was the owner’s
Mongoloid brother propped up by the front door, the thick lad of
indeterminate age wearing Lee bib overalls without benefit of shirt.
“Mr. O’Meara?”
“Miss Rollins?”
She handed the folder to me, its flat black surface now sporting
what looked like stains from a soda bottle’s syrupy bottom. I thanked her,
said it was mine and left, placing the folder in the side basket of my rusty
English 3-speed bicycle. I pedaled back toward Athens proper for a halfmile until in a rush, my curiosity led me to steer the battered bike off the
county road. I rolled to a shaky stop on a shady patch of grass beneath a
huge and ancient oak. My back propped against its mammoth trunk, I
slowly loosened the yellow string and gingerly removed the folder’s
contents, spreading them before me in the grass.
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Connie Rollins’ words came back to me, charging the languid afternoon
air.
“I did take a little peek,” she had said as she handed the folder to
me. “But just to see if there was some I. D.? Looks like a bunch of pictures
a little kid made? Real cute, clever. You have children, Mr. O’Meara?”
In all there were six Picassos, all signed, three drawings and three
gouaches. In the bottom of the accordion folder lay a cardboard tube about
fourteen inches long. When I tapped its end, a small, canvas emerged.
Carefully unrolling it in the slanting light, a sudden breeze noisily
disarranging the oak’s full, dusty foliage, I saw that I was looking at a
street scene, obviously Parisian. There, down in the left-hand corner of the
small oil canvas was the signature—Claude Monet 77.
It seemed like a half-hour passed before I took a breath. There is no
doubt, even now as I recall that day, that this moment beneath that oak
was my apogee, spiritually and physically. Before me on the grass lay these
astonishingly beautiful works, each completely untethered and unfettered,
frameless, pure, and at least in this slice of suspended time, without owner.
The Monet, its corners secured beneath four small field stones, and just
beyond it, arranged in an arc, the Picassos, together comprising an earthly
vision of wherever God calls home.
The folder also yielded a single format-type negative as well as a
strip of 35 mm negatives, all portrait shots from what had clearly been a
single sitting, Alfred Eisenstaedt’s face familiar to me from our brief
encounter the previous fall, but not revealed until I had the negatives
developed the next day, when I held them in one hand and a telephone
receiver in the other.
“Who is calling, please?”
After being placed on hold for a second time, a new voice came on,
this one older, more authoritative.
“I’m sorry, Mr. O’Meara. Mr. Eisenstaedt passed away just—”
I don’t recall what else was said, just the gradual then rapid fading
of the voice in New York, until finally I saw my hand placing the receiver
in its cradle. There in the far remove of north Georgia, in a way I’ve now
witnessed several times in adult life, right and wrong intersected in so many
blinding ways that I was stripped clean of reason. But with time, a rationale,
white hot in its initial energy then a steady cool emerged and led me over
a period of two short weeks to conclude that the works now belonged to
me. Picasso, dead. Eisenstaedt, dead. Why surrender the art to a faceless
legal system. . . no, several legal systems, one being French. no less. Where
would these precious works end up? In whose grasping hands, which exwife, self-proclaimed progeny, attorney’s villa?
So, yes, I stole them.
Over the next several years, I developed an interest in the art market
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and used two of the gouaches on the gray market to leverage purchases, a
small Pissarro and a Daumier. Working as features editor on the Times
Picayune in New Orleans, I found my way into this sub-tier of the art world
through a real estate news source, learning in the process that among other
things, the S and L crisis had transformed the way various institutions view
assets, in effect creating out of thin air a whole universe of new currencies,
one of them being fine art. In the vernacular, I continued to trade-up, always
holding back the Monet, though, as I was fearful that even on the gray
market it might bring the beam of scrutiny upon me. No one, including
Darien, even knows of the small oil’s existence. Once a year, I fly back to
Athens, take it out of the safety deposit box where I’ve stored it all these
years, and drive out to that same grand oak to spend a few hours with it.
With the passing years, I saw only the painting and not the lingering traces
of theft that were sometimes present there just above the surfaces of those
masterful brushstrokes.
Things changed in regards to all of this a few months ago,
reminding me of something my father once told me as a teenager—that
lies never remain static. I was in London on assignment for the Chronicle
in San Francisco, researching a business series that promised to be definitive
on European/Asian trade and its impacts on California. Our executive
editor, having seen the prelims I’d faxed to him from Britain, was quite
excited, already talking major prizes. Two weeks into the trip, I was lunching
with an old friend, a retired city editor from Philadelphia, Sam Erickson,
who now lived in London, ancestral home of his thoroughly English wife.
An amateur art historian, Sam had a contract for a small book of
conversations he had shared with Francis Bacon toward the end of the
painter’s life, loose, informal chats about art, personalities, food. The appeal
of the material, Sam explained to me, was that it presented a seldom seen
side of the artist. At ease, even jovial and spontaneously and playfully
candid, Bacon had found in Sam Erickson, a man of his age and without an
ounce of pretension, a late boon companion. Over Champagne in Sam’s
townhouse or in regular lunch haunts, the two established an intimacy, all
the sweeter, I gathered, due to its having arrived late.
“You might enjoy this, Barry,” Sam said after the waiter had taken
our orders. He handed me a typescript of something clearly relevant to the
Bacon book at I noted the “Hormel” slug in the upper left hand corner of
the bond, the journalistic page tag being typical of the humor they shared.
“It’s a wonderful story. Frankly, I’d forgotten about it,” Sam offered, taking
a sip of his first gin and tonic. “Found it with some notes I’m sorting.”
* * * *
You know, Samuel, painters are a funny lot. If there’s even a
gram of integrity, they’ll own up to their imprisonment. The greater the commercial
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success, the smaller the cage. That’s why a painter will change styles. It’s
not about getting at a bigger truth, none of that rubbish. It’s about squirming
his way through the bloody bars. (raucous laugher, Guinness spilt on table,
FB dabbing at it with the folded napkin/then blows nose with same) A
painter will play games, usually with himself, sometimes with others—his
dealer, the critics. I’ll tell you a hugely revealing story. You know the
photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt? Yes, well, he had a commission to do a
series of photographs of me, there in my studio, and he told me of a thing
he and Picasso did down in France when Alfred was visiting the villa one
summer. “Fuck the sitting, fuck your camera!” was how it went one morning
after breakfast when Picasso changed his mind about letting Eisenstaedt
take some portraits of him. But springing back from his sour mood, he
caught up with Alfred in the herb garden where he had escaped Pablo for
a peaceful goddamn cigarette.
Now, Pablo never apologized to anyone for anything as far as we know,
but he did have his ways of making-up with his victims (said with acute appreciation/
recognition—just now noticing tissue on FB’s neck from shaving cut no longer
there/where’d it go?). In this instance, he told Alfred Eisenstaedt he had an idea.
Why not switch careers for the rest of the morning? Picasso would be the
photographer, Alfred the painter. Eisenstaedt told me he sensed an ugly trap of
some kind, maybe even a pretense for another blow-up that would send him packing,
but Pablo could be very persuasive, what? So they spent the balance of the morning,
breaking for a leisurely lunch, doing one another’s art. Eisenstaedt said it was an
absolute delight, Pablo fumbling like a clown with the cameras, a lens popping out
onto the tile floor at one point, one of the tripod legs collapsing at the precise moment
he activated the shutter. As for the “painter,” Eisenstaedt produced several small
works on paper. Picasso, against his visitor’s protests, snapped up the works and
pinned them to the wall and eyed them like a peregrine falcon. Eisenstaedt told me
he had been mortified, fearing that Picasso would think he had been mocking the
master with his imitation! (great laughter, delight—waiter in starched white jacket
hovering, working up courage to ask for Bacon’s autograph). Eisenstaedt wouldn’t
say more about it except to add that after looking at the work for a long, long while,
Pablo studied the photographer with a sort of demonic grin, snatched-up a pencil
from a table, and signed his own bloody name six times to six works Eisenstaedt
had produced, just like that! (FB roaring like a small lion, waving off the waiter
who had only made it into FB’s peripheral vision) Eisenstaedt told me he had
forgotten the episode until a few years after Picasso’s death when a package, sealed
and initialed by the painter himself, was finally handed over to him by the bloody
lawyers for the estate. A small miracle, what, that none of those thieves had at it
first! And inside? The “Picassos,” the “Eisenstaedts.” End of story, Master Sam.
* * * *
When I handed the typescript back to Samuel, he was frowning.
“Terrible news, terrible news.”
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“What? I asked dreamily.
“Your response, Barry. If you don’t see the beauty of the tale, what
hope does my publisher have for the general reader? he laughed, lighting
a fat, unfiltered cigarette. “Your expression, you look like you’ve just read
a goddamn coroner’s report.”
“Sorry , Sam. The workload, deadlines. Very long days.”
So, there you have it, the “game” I would not play with Jonah and
the others at dinner, but before you condemn me out of hand, consider the
choices before me, especially the choices before me as a journalist, whose
word, in the end, is his only real professional currency. There’s the shady
business behind the Pissarro, the Daumier. And Darien? Those Picassos on
the wall? My gift to her on our wedding day, her sweet tears a memory I’ll
never be equipped to tarnish.
And looming over all of this with genuinely oppressive weight, is,
of course, the Claude Monet. If appraisals should reveal it to be genuine, I
would have more explaining to do than my character would ever withstand,
just how such an extraordinary gift from one artist to another had come
into my possession. And if found to be a fake? Might it be Picasso’s extension
of the game he and the photographer had played that day in France? There
would hardly be a rush to assign the fake to Pablo Picasso, although it
would doubtlessly help propel Sam Erickson’s little book up the charts,
and perhaps through association, trash his reputation as well should we be
seen as just another pair of interlopers in the wide-open field of art fraud.
So the Parisian street scene, in all its subtle and muted glory, remains
safely locked away, a prisoner in its small cage, to borrow Francis Bacon’s
apt metaphor.
Suburban sprawl has permanently stained the edges of sleepy
Athens now but the meadow and oak are still there, unspoiled, just outside
town, and this afternoon, as I’ve done so many times before, I unrolled the
canvas and lay it on the grass before me, anchoring it as I did for the first
time years ago with small stones that I keep at the base of the trunk, and
just sat there with it in the high summer shade, branches sheltering me,
guiding me to again wonder, in the lemon sky silence, just where Claude
Monet has taken me.
Janet Fine
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Janet Fine
Presence
Tom Bentley
These days, I ask very little of life. I keep mostly to myself, only go out to
pick up the absolute necessities, to see the doctors, once in a while to look
at the sea. No universities call about teaching positions any more. Now,
I’m only asking that these memories cease. Memories are supposed to be
shadows, gauzy things that recede as fast as you stretch for them. Mine are
slaps to the face, delivered by a relentless, pursuing hand. And they are
becoming more insistent. It’s the way Amity would have wanted it.
It’s funny, I guess, how the only memories with any teeth to them are all of
my adolescence, a time so long ago, some thirty years. It’s a rare thing now
when I think of my wife, but she was always somewhat indistinct to me—
I couldn’t even tell you how long ago she left. And my sons, so unlike me,
so rangy and quick to anger, careless products of my infrequent, pointless
lust; I haven’t heard from them in years. But I don’t have any feelings about
it, one way or another.
When I was fourteen I didn’t give a damn about feelings. I was coursing
with spunk and cheap bravado, and the more scorn I could heap upon any
person or thing, the higher I could climb on that heap to look down. I’d
lived all my life in Southern California, its middle-class neighborhoods as
symmetrical as its neat lawns, as regular as its barbecues, a bland face made
up to cover its deeper blemishes. I was just learning to finger those
blemishes, see behind that camouflage—and take pleasure in their
judgment.
I was a charter member of the jury that mocked that disfigured face, every
evening after school at the corner. The corner was just a juncture of two
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common suburban streets in late-fifties America, but it was our courtroom,
where every trite drama of pubescence was scrutinized. More importantly,
it also faced directly across from Amity’s house. She was witness, when
she chose to drag her bony presence to her windows, to most of our
struttings and stormings: the carnage from the rock fights, the clumsy
courtings of immature love, and every echo from our homely games of
baseball.
Amity’s been dead for many years, but I see her wraithlike frame and sallow
face clearly—too, too clearly. I still remember most of the things we called
her—witch seems all too appropriate now. But we called her many things,
things born of the remarkably creative cruelty of children, just discovering
the heady power of spite. Looking back at all that we did makes a man’s
throat dry—I’ll pour a little drink. I’ll see these things too clearly all the
same, but a drink keeps me company; it’s sociable, in a gathering of ghosts.
The first time I saw Amity we were in front of her house playing work-up,
a baseball variation where you move from position to position by outs until
you get to bat. It was a typical mid-Fall evening, warm and dry. I was playing
catcher, still trying to figure out the pecking order of my new cronies; I’d
just begun to hang around this neighborhood after one of my family’s moves
to another one of L.A.’s endless suburbs. I’d never had any commerce with
alcoholics. I didn’t know they could live in your neighborhood, could
change your life.
Our game had just begun when Amity careened out of her house with
what I would come to know was a characteristic cry, a trebly squawk of
derision that announced that she was in her “you kids are dirt” mood—
one that alternated, sometimes miraculously within the same hour, with
her dewy “you kids are all I have” mood. One signal trait of her appearances
would be ever unchanged: the air round her person was always smirched
with drink, and I smelled this painting of the atmosphere before I had even
turned toward her.
“Baseball! You kids don’t know how to play baseball!” she shrieked, and
while I tried to concentrate on the incoming pitch I caught her flailing
movement out of the corner of my eye.
She looked as though she had been designed to be a drunk—forty-five
going on several lifetimes of ruin. Tangled, dirt-colored hair, thrown in
every direction. Campfire-ember patches of red on her pallid face, blotchy
nose crosshatched with veins, skin saddened by the burden of its slack
stretching across the spindly body. She wore an improbable gypsy outfit of
loose purple.
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I turned to look into her bloodshot eyes and recoiled from the torrent of
words that gushed from her smudged red lips.
“You’re no catcher. I was captain of the softball team at my girls’ school in
Maryland two years in a row.” She turned and waggled her stick-fingers at
the whole gaping group. “You kids can’t play baseball. You can’t play
anything. You’re all a bunch of goddamned punks!” Her emphasis on the
last word caused her to totter a bit and her arm snaked out to my shoulder
for support. The whole disaster of her face was inches from mine, the sweetsour breath coating my face, and she whispered to me, “Do I know you? Or
are you just part of this trash?”
I can hear the strange fetching in her voice yet, I hear it now, but then I
stood gaping, immobile, until Spencer Martin shouted from third base, “For
Christ’s sake, Amity, go tell it to the Marines. I think there’s a sale on cooking
sherry at Alpha Beta. Why don’t you go for a look-see?”
Spencer was almost seventeen, and when he deigned to play with us, we
gave him every respect. I admired his quick dispatch of the situation—I
hadn’t known you could razz adults directly to their faces. The rest of the
players began to chime in as well. From well out in the outfield I could hear
Jackie Umgrunt wailing, “Amity’s a bubble-butt. Bubble-Up comes out
her bubble-butt.” Jackie had wailed the same phrase at every batter that
day: her resources were limited, but never withheld.
I wiggled free of Amity’s grip and stood amazed as she turned back to me
and said, “You’re hell-bound in a hurry if you take up with these crumbs.”
Then she made her brittle way back into the house.
The kids quickly spelled out the situation: Amity was our local lush, living
alone, unpredictable and half-crazed, always good for a scary kind of laugh.
I sensed immediately that she could be a resource; making sport of her
seemed like an opportunity for me to get in good with the gang. But behind
the chance to rally around taunting Amity, I sensed something else stirring.
Even then, though I couldn’t have voiced it, I sensed the fascination of
corruption. Amity was repulsive, but it was the repulsion of the dark cave—
something in her voice made me want to go inside.
However, I thought nothing of Amity until two nights later when seven or
eight of us were having footraces to the big lamppost in front of her house.
Jackie and I flashed out toward the pole, both converging on a “V.” Heedless
of our collision course, I took the worst of a tremendous blow when our
heads slammed as we were both reaching for the pole.
PGR 91
I was flat on my back, a heavy thudding in my head, only partially
conscious; the sky was a Christmas tree of twinkling lights. The first face I
could make out was Amity’s, inches from mine, her bedraggled hair
reaching claw-like towards me, the filmy, almost-viscous cloud of her breath
settling on my face. She was patting one of my cheeks, murmuring, “That’s
my boy, that’s my boy, I’m here, I’m here,” while Jackie kneeled with her
head in her hands and the others clumped around in a hapless mass. Amity
was wearing some garish, low-cut kimono-like thing that let me look at
her tired breasts. I closed my eyes.
“He’s going to be all right,” she said. “Now you darlings keep him company
while I run in the house and get him some Seven-Up.”
She went off at a wobbly trot and I raised myself up on my elbows, while
the others crowded around like vultures. “Man, that was gory,” Eddie
Milton said. “She creamed your head royal!”
Amity returned with a green plastic glass filled with Seven-Up and ice.
She offered it to me and I drank it greedily; only after I finished it did I
register the oddness of its flavor. It had a queer tang, not unpleasant, a soft
sharpness that the carbonation couldn’t mask. I stood shakily up and
handed her the glass. She stood gazing at me, a wry smile on her face.
“Uh, thank you, thanks a lot, Amity,” I said. “Jeez, my head feels like it’s
been run over. Hey, what kind of Seven-Up was that anyway? It had a
weird taste to it.”
She walked up and patted me on the shoulder. “Just some Seven-Up for
my boy. Some Seven-Up and medicine for my boy.” She squeezed my
shoulder and tottered off.
“Ooohh, Amity likes Cory. It’s not a good thing having a witch like you,”
Jackie said, still massaging her head.
I barely responded to the kids’ ribbing; I was noticing a peculiar sensation
of pleasure that was playing counterpoint to my drumming skull. Amity
had served me my first drink; my first taste of whiskey, and my body took
to it, sang with it, recognized it as Amity seemed to recognize me. I went
home with a headache and a vague sense of uneasy curiosity.
I think that old proposition that “had I known then what I know now,” is
absurd. I see now that it was a linked chain of events that dragged me
again and again to the corner. A chain that years later tied up a man who
had metamorphosed into a creature, one who dully watched his children
PGR 92
and his wife walk out on him. I couldn’t have slipped that chain, no, that’s
just crap, just lacy romantic mooning. This I know—your destiny pulls
you like a winch with that steel chain, and all your squirming to pull free is
just pathetic waste. The doctors told me I wouldn’t hit fifty, but it seems
fitting. I welcome it. All I want is for the memories to stop.
I can’t help but give myself a cynical laugh now—me, a former philosophy
professor, talking about destiny. The world’s foremost thinkers had so many
eloquent approaches to those systems of order, final causes, final purposes.
Hah! My hands shook more and more steadily over the years writing out
my inane comments on the fatuous papers of my students. My “final
purpose” was to flit from school to less prestigious school, and every time
I left there was less of me to continue on. I still have two books in print that
provide a small income. I looked at one of the books in a store a few years
back: ideas caked and powdery, written by a being gutted long ago. I don’t
recognize the author who bears my name.
But enough of that. What needs to be told, what has to be told, is what is in
these punishing recollections. Then they will stop; they must stop. Perhaps
a drink, yes.
I see Amity’s lover, with painful clarity. His name was Walter. He was
completely bald, gleamingly pink-skinned, a tiny man who walked with a
jerky, stiff-legged gait, sometimes with a cane, sometimes not. He drove a
huge late-model Cadillac; the first time I saw him whip up and get out it
looked like a puppet, some kind of manikin, was directing this great
locomotive of metal. All of this meant one thing to us: He was a target. He
was Waldo Baldo, Hopalong Cassidy, Captain Pegleg—we would shout
all these epithets at his arrival, with asinine mimickings of a handicapped
man, the more grotesque the better.
This low theater was acted out on the parkway strip of grass on the corner,
across the street from Amity’s house. We critics only found fault if the
depictions weren’t malicious enough. Sometimes, Jill, Jackie’s younger
sister, would protest: “You guys are so mean!” But she would be overruled
in this courtroom: These jurists were coyotes around a kill.
A few weeks after Amity had given me my first cocktail, a bunch of the
corner crew were loosely grouped on the parkway and on the street around
the fire hydrant, the lighthouse beacon for the corner. We boys were
practicing our spitting on the hydrant while the girls stood in the
background exclaiming in disgust. The evening before we had blasted
Amity’s mailbox to flinders with a couple of M-80s, and had hidden behind
the McGovern’s fence next door while she came out and tore the sky with
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curses. We could see the faint outline in the paint of where the mailbox had
been; it was a much crowed-about satisfaction.
We were determining whose spit hung longest on the hydrant when Walter
and Amity came booming down the street in his car. Eddie and I popped
out further to taunt Walter, but he veered sharply towards us, firing the big
bullet nose of that Cadillac at us with enough sincerity to make Eddie and
me vault to the safety of the parkway. I could see his little head, eyes fixed
and jaw locked, as he wheeled by. He jerked the car to a stop in Amity’s
driveway and they both got out, stared at us for a moment, and walked
into her house in silence.
We were thunderstruck. But children have fine reaction times—the plotting
of vengeance was swift and uncomplex. Eddie, Pearce McGovern and I
galloped over to Walter’s car commando style, jumped up and ran on its
vast bulk, springing up and down the length of the great machine, shouting
our slanders out at Walter.
He was out on the porch in an instant, livid, his pink skull gone to high
color. “You goddamned kids get off that car! You’ll regret it, you goddamned
little monsters!”
He was spluttering, choking with rage. Amity appeared behind the screen
door, carrying some long, thin object. Jackie, not far from the car, screamed,
“Amity’s got a gun! She’s got a gun!” We all bolted in several directions.
Eddie, Pearce and I locked ourselves in the McGovern’s garage, silent except
for our ragged breathing. A few minutes later, I could hear Amity out on
the sidewalk. I felt her presence before she even spoke.
“Cory, I need to talk to you,” she said in a throaty, hushed voice. “Where
are you, Cory? Come out now.”
We stayed put, shaking with suppressed laughter and exquisite fear. Long
after they had gone inside and we had regrouped, Jill took some of the
flourish off our triumph by telling us that Amity’s gun was a broom. But I
could only wonder why she called to me. It took some years to see how
fully I answered her.
There are memories that burn much brighter, that scald the skin. Months
after these events, after countless hateful pranks pulled on Walter and Amity,
after a hundred spewings of vileness from Amity back at us, she continued
to treat me differently than the other kids. Not particularly nice, but
searchingly, in some indefinite way. She unnerved me, and I never felt
balanced around her.
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One Saturday morning I was down at the corner with Neal, our resident
troubadour. His father had been some cut-rate entertainer in dive clubs in
the hinterlands of Los Angeles. Neal had picked up some of his father’s
bad habits. He’d strum an acoustic guitar and sing corny Sinatra songs—
”Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out To Dry”—and weepy ballads. He knew all
of the words to “Tom Dooley.” No amount of sneering could get him to get
off it. He wouldn’t do Elvis Presley on a bet.
Anyway, Neal was walking through some Nat King Cole number on his
guitar, “Unforgettable,” I think, and I was firing dirt clods at the globe of
the big lamppost in front of Amity’s house.
Amity walked out and stood with a mooncow smile on her face, her hands
drawn dramatically up to her bosom. I pretended not to notice her. She
issued these wracking sighs, and then she dashed into her house and came
back with something wrapped in crackling cellophane and handed it to
Neal. I stopped throwing clods to listen to what she said to him.
“...and it’s just the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard. My father used to
sing in our house when I was a young girl! I have to leave for a while, but
please promise me you’ll come back to the house this evening and sing a
few songs for me. But you can’t come without Cory,” she said, glancing
quickly at me. “Please promise.”
Neal muttered something noncommittal and she went into the house. He
was staring at the stuff in the cellophane. I walked up as he opened the
package.
“Wow,” he said, pulling out some strands of what looked to be strips of
dull, greenish-black plastic or leather, “Amity said she bought this licorice
to give to us a while ago. It’s gotta be fifty years old!” He flung a piece at
the street. It shattered like peanut brittle.
“The old hag,” I said. “Listen, normally I wouldn’t go into Amity’s house if
you paid me, but I just thought of an idea of how we can celebrate Pearce’s
birthday tonight in the treehouse. We need to go into Amity’s. Meet me
back here just when it’s getting dark.”
I knew Neal would go along with it. He was goofy enough to want to sing
those mushy songs to an old bat. That night, Amity met us, very unsteadily,
at the door. She was a good deal more drunk than usual. She patted Neal
on the back as he walked in, but she grabbed both of my shoulders and
stood staring at me in the dim light of her grubby house. All the furniture
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was covered with what looked like the shabby cassocks of poor monks,
ragged and dark like Amity’s strange old dress. She looked awful,
ghoulishly pale and caked with makeup. She peered into my eyes and said,
“You’re very close to me, Cory. You’re not a nice boy—you’re just like me.
You don’t know how much you’re like me.”
Her breath was like a pungent fabric, a sweet-sour cloth that draped my
face. I drew back in near agony. Neal began singing “Let’s Do It,” and Amity
hovered close to him, fixing him with a rapturous stare. Her hands fluttered
from her face to the décolletage of the shabby, out-of-date gown she was
wearing. She made some whimpery, girlish squeaks. It was appallingly
obvious that she felt that this was a sort of serenade.
I stood aghast, but then I went to work. While Amity sat gooey-eyed on
her ragtag loveseat and Neal sloshed out songs that begged for retirement,
I scouted in Amity’s kitchen. It was a mess, dishes splashed in haphazard
piles, and a sulfurous smell like an old mineral cave. In a narrow, deep
cabinet I found the booze, bottles and bottles of the same cheap brand of
whiskey, a testimony to raw need. I know now that there is some style to
personal pollution: if you are going to hell, go then, but go gracefully—
don’t arrive in a Rambler. Good whiskey rolls down your throat, with a
sweet firecracker at the end. Bad whiskey does the job, but coarsely.
Bad whiskey it was, though, and as I slipped a fifth under my coat, I heard
Amity say behind me, “There’s no reason to drink alone, Cory.”
My heart pounds now when I think of it, I am there, I am there now, the hair
standing on my neck. I turned to her, thrust out the bottle and croaked,
“OK.”
Neal walked into the kitchen just as Amity filled my half-full glass of
whiskey to the brim with Seven-Up.
“Hey, Cory, I completely forgot that I’m supposed to shop with my dad at
the hi-fi store tonight for a new reel-to-reel. We’re going to make some
recordings together. I’ve gotta run. Goodnight Amity.”
He walked out. I don’t think he even noticed the liquor bottle. Amity had
never taken her eyes from me while Neal was talking. She handed me the
glass and said, “Come into the living room and sit down, Cory, we need to
talk.”
She put her hand on my shoulder, and though she was barely taller than
me, and cadaverous besides, it felt like a huge hand was directing me
PGR 96
forward, pushing me down. But I felt an odd eagerness as well as fear.
She sat me down on the loveseat, handed me my drink, and then sat
perpendicular to me, leaning back on the arm of the couch, so that her bare
feet were touching the side of my thigh. I was conscious of their soft
pressure. I gulped at my drink as though my insides were aflame. I finished
two-thirds of it in one stinging swallow. It felt like my spine was tingling,
and I sensed a muted popping in my head, like from a yawn on a descending
plane. I began to sweat.
“There’s no need to hurry, Cory. Everything is better when it’s done slowly,”
Amity said, curling her toes against my leg. She had her head cocked
sideways and down so that her serpent hair covered one of her eyes; a
small smile was on her swollen, purplish lips. I looked away from her and
quickly finished my drink.
“You’ve run a little low, Cory. I’ll fix you another. My boy is going to get
what he needs.” She rose and went into the kitchen. Her billowing gown
made it seem as though she floated darkly through the air. I sat with my
fists clenched in my lap, but the rest of me was sunk like a heavy weight
into the deep cushions of the couch. I had a conscious thought that I should
go, but I felt like I couldn’t get up. My ears were buzzing; I realized that I
was humming one of the tunes that Neal had sung earlier.
Amity glided in and sat down as she had before. She had brought the bottle,
which she set on the chipped coffee table in front of the loveseat. She was
now drinking straight whiskey out of a big tumbler. The dim floor lamp
above the loveseat cast a mellow glow through the liquor. She had made
my drink much stronger; I had to sharply inhale after my first gulp—it felt
like a big, electric river with branching tributaries was leaping its banks
through my body.
“Thanks, Amity. It’s good. Everything’s good.” My voice sounded to me
like it was coming up through the floor. I was sitting with my feet up on
the table, and Amity arched her back and slipped her feet under my leg so
that her soles were against the inner thigh of my other leg, her heel butting
up against my crotch. Surprised, I instantly brought my legs down, which
only pressed her foot tighter to my crotch. I still looked straight ahead. I
felt paralyzed, except for one part of me: my stiffening penis was pushing
back against the pressure of her foot.
“Try and relax, Cory. Amity knows what’s best for you. Amity knows
everything.” I didn’t look at her; I took a big swallow of my drink. “That’s
right. Drink deeply, my boy. You’ll always drink with me, even after I’m
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gone.” I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I nodded; it was like
I was hypnotized.
She began to softly massage my testicles with her foot, rhythmically,
insistently. Involuntarily, I pressed my hips forward, my eyelids lowered,
my breaths shallow. I stretched out my arm to grip the bottom cushion of
the loveseat, but Amity grabbed my hand and put it between her legs. The
heat and dampness shocked me, but I left it there; she pressed my hand
against her and I pressed back.
I’d never touched a girl, much less a woman. I’d never even touched myself
much, except to ineptly grab my stiff penis in bed at night when I thought
about the budding breasts of my classmates. No wet dream had ever
dampened my sheets. This was a new world to me and I could barely
breathe its air, but I gulped at it thirstily.
Our movements became more urgent, more rapid. I shudder now, I see it
so clearly. Me on that faded loveseat, looking straight ahead, eyes glazed,
drink in one hand, my other hand between Amity’s legs, deep in her warm
wetness, her feet rubbing relentlessly against my organ, her hand gripping
the neck of the whiskey bottle....
It may have been only a few moments, I don’t know—time was twisted—
but I came with a convulsive gush and a small scream and Amity lifted her
hips from the couch, gave a loud, quaking gasp and then fell back. I
swallowed the rest of my drink and got up. I barely looked at her, but I saw
that her eyes were closed and her lips drawn back in a stiff rictus over her
mottled teeth. She didn’t move. I took the bottle from her outstretched hand
and mumbled a goodbye. I almost ran out of the house.
But I felt no shame, nothing like what I feel now. I left that house halfdrunk, but somehow ordained, defined. I can see my eager, happy face as
I headed to meet my buddies. It’s been said that a man’s character is his
fate; I dove headfirst, happily, into fate’s waters—I didn’t slip, there was
no accident. I realize now that she knew, she had planned.
That night Eddie, Pearce, my brother Larry and I got drunk, in the Milton’s
big treehouse, where we were all spending the night. I hadn’t even bothered
to clean myself up; I just pulled my t-shirt down over my pants. Larry and
Pearce both got sick, mostly because they were drinking vodka and Grape
Crush and eating Cheetohs. I drank unwatered whiskey: steadily, proudly,
victoriously. Thoroughly drunk for the first time in my life, and it felt like a
snug set of tailor-made clothes.
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When we came fuddle-eyed out of the Milton’s backyard the next morning,
we saw the two ambulances and the police car at Amity’s. We ran over just
as they were loading her body into the back of an ambulance. She was
covered by a sheet, but one veiny, discolored hand dangled over the side,
its bony fingers vaguely pointing towards me as we approached. People
around said that she had apparently died of a heart attack in the night, but
I knew more, knowledge I never shared. Walter sat on the front porch crying.
He looked so tiny, a broken doll.
It didn’t take long for the astonishment of it all to wear off, and for our
instincts for cruelty to take over. We gathered on the corner, speculating
whether they served drinks in Hell, whether it was her taste in licorice that
killed her. We were just children, ignorant, it’s true, but it seems to me that
there is a native blackness, a turn towards evil, in all our hearts.
I rambled through my
adolescence, not unlike
any other child, though I
seemed to drink a bit
more than most of my
buddies. It wasn’t really
even clear to me that I
was a drunk until I was
already teaching at a
community college in
Long Beach, taking shots
of whiskey between
classes and not giving
one good damn that
Plato thought that virtue
was teachable. I was
concerned with vice.
Arlene Smith
I don’t miss Amity,
because she’s in every
bottle I drink, a presence.
I drink greedily, but still
I thirst. I have nothing
left to build on in this life.
I only have these
memories, and they have
me.
PGR 99
Goose Eyes: A Foul Diary
Brian Voegtlen
Goose Eyes is a goose, which may seem redundant to us but to her
it is a fine proud thing to be. She is a big white goose with the typical
goosian intensity of character. You can see it in her eyes. A goose with goose
eyes is not something I usually get very close to on account of goose beaks,
stiff lowered goose necks, goose hissing and the even more cantankerous
goose honking which so often comes belting out of goose beaks. The way
they flatten their necks down and jut their heads out at you and charge, or
at least act like they definitely mean to at any second, is enough to keep
goose eyes at bay. Those eyes, the neck, the beak, the whole goose racket
package suggest that you should not back away slowly but turn and run
straight through the fence, leveling it without apology. Not being a farm
boy, this has always been my plan with regards to geese; when I am safely
away I wonder, are they all bred to be guard geese, some type of bad
tempered farm security who thinks the whole world is about to commit a
crime? Where I come from it’s a road epidemic but these guys always seem
to have a honking bad case of farm rage.
Day One I’m weeding onions, that is pulling out a tiny, pesky,
weedy variety of onion that have completely taken over a neighbor woman’s
yard. In this same yard with the onions live a couple of rabbits, a large
hairy dog (with the weed-name of Mallow), five or six related cats (related
only to each other although they share the black and brown markings of
the dog), and two large, imposing geese, one each white and gray; a
cockatiel, horse and goat are nearby. Somehow though it is only the geese
that you notice: the dog is quiet and likes to stick by his owner, the rabbits
are particularly unobtrusive, and the cats slide silently by like clouds passing
in the distance. You can’t even catch their eyes. The geese on the other
hand, are running around everywhere. They’re the gate keepers, alarm
sounders, news breakers, born complainers, rearing to rile up the entire
neighborhood. That’s just when they hear me coming. When I actually step
into the yard all hell breaks loose. All heckle explodes like I stepped on a
land mine, a hidden button activating the air-raid alarm, “Thief! Murderer!
Rape! Pillage!—He’s the one, stop that man!!!” I would turn and bolt straight
away except for the onions and trying to make a buck or two.
Day Two I figure you just have to go with the flow, let them go on
with their show, because they won’t shut up no matter what you may say
to the contrary. Eventually the hailstorm passes, they stop careening around
at angry angles, they cool down honking, settle down in traffic. But they
don’t take their eyes off of me. They still regard me as an obvious murderer,
but they’ve done what they can to alert the world. Help may not be coming
so they resign themselves to active patrol—they’ll just have to keep a close
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eye on me for the time being. And if I get up from weeding to empty my
bucket of onions, well then it becomes imperative to remind the world that
a calamitous and felonious disaster is imminent—Honk honk honk!
Day Three After three days of this surveillance the geese begin
slacking off on the job. I’m getting away with all manner of previously
forbidden movements. Gray goose pretends to sleep not six feet away,
plopped down, neck curled back around, head tucked under a wing. But
the eye, the one goose eye, is still open. They can be almost cute when I’m
not terrified of them. Which reminds me that although I may not have
been born with a instinctual fear of geese (I assume I was and everyone
else was too) I was chased, as a young child, through a botanical garden by
a large mob of unruly geese. I was not much bigger than they were and not
much faster. I never liked ‘em since that day. Or before that day that I can
recall. But today, I have to say, they’re definitely looking un-hateable.
Day Four Nothing injurious has occurred to anyone here; I am
relaxing, weeding with an easy sense of well-being. And then I begin to
think of little kindnesses I might do them. I change their water. They have,
in lieu of a lake or a stream or pond, two small buckets of water. Very
muddy, feathery, slimy water. I pour it out, hose out the buckets, refill them.
Instantly they jog over to see what is up, they’re curious as cats and not the
least wary. Gray Goose bites the water and finds it delicious, White Goose
dips her head in and rolls it up ‘till the water pours down her neck and
onto her back. She does it over and over in a continuous wave of spilling
water, the next best thing to immersion. She knows that if she tried to get
in that tiny body of water like a normal duck or goose would expect to do
she’d be stuck in a bucket—a bucket with a long neck sticking out honking
in despair. But her bath is brilliant, beautiful, efficient, and splashy. She
rubs the back of her head and neck around on all her feathers—she’s bleachy
clean and shinny in no time. And grateful.
Day Five I’m beyond onions now and on to blackberries and crab
grass but the geese remain steady. Although as they remain they change.
Especially White Goose; I can almost see her transforming into something
beyond my experience, not into a storybook-like swan, but fledging into a
whole new goose category in my head, maybe who she wanted to be all
along.
I find an abandoned black plastic mini-pond on the property. It’s
dirty and has holes. I clean and repair it and fill it with water. Gray Goose
keeps a wary eye on the proceedings but White Goose can’t wait, she hops
in while it’s still filling, floats buoyantly and flaps water up all over her
back as she paddles about looking youthful and happy.
Later Days In the newspaper I read; “A goose cannot look straight
forward without turning its head.” which doesn’t seem very straight
forward of them to me. But seen from a different perspective— imagine
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you have no lips to purse or pout, no mouth to turn up or down and twist
around, no nose to wrinkle, no dimples, cheeks, eye brows or eye lashes,
no wrinkles, no ability to squint your eyes or roll them or widen them, no
shoulders to shrug, no hands to gesture with. Not a lot of communicative
options. There you pretty much have the situation of a goose. And you
couldn’t say they had a very pleasant voice either. So how, as a goose, are
you going to express things? Things in general: questions, ideas, doubts,
worries, wonderment, but more specifically friendliness, affection, love,
caring? With limited options you would soon find yourself cocking your
head about this way and that at subtly different yet very expressive angles.
And of course there’s the neck which tells a lot (not just meanness), and
some variation in vocal intonations, discernible at least, to someone as
perceptive as another goose.
And so this is how white goose proceeds to make friends, to gaze
at me, not over long like a stare, but to peer at me, turning her head, tilting
it, trying to convey in eyes so blue and flat and empty that connection is
possible, that closeness is inherent. She makes goose eyes at me. She doesn’t
want to alarm me, she can tell I am basically scared of geese, or at least a
shy type, so she moves in slowly, imperceptibly. One moment I catch her
out of the corner of my eye passing close behind me, another time I see she
doesn’t get up to give way when I pass her to unload my bucket of weeds.
She follows me around like a toddler just three feet behind me wherever I
go. Finally she approaches me with her vacant but expressive eyes and just
keeps coming closer and closer. I am squatted down weeding, eye level to
a goose and feeling a little vulnerable. I shift backwards and say things
like, “Where’re ya going there goose.” and “Hey I’m busy here now, goose.
I need some space.” She tilts her head at me as tilted as possible; surely I
can understand.
In the back of her throat (wherever that may be) she makes a quiet
little rasping noise that sounds to me at first like the last gasping for air of
a man dying of lung cancer. But I need to interpret things in a different
light now. It’s not a death rattle it’s more of a sweet whisper, an affectionate
little gurgle. She waddles right up to me—while I pull weeds she nibbles
on my shoes. Is she trying to help? Does she want me to feed her? What
does it mean? Why does it take me so long to see this little nibbling is goose
kissing. Goose kissing at it’s most casual, least threatening level. Her owner
tells me Goose Eyes probably has amorous intentions towards me, as in
mating, but I like to think our relationship has a more spiritual dimension;
we have a level of communication and trust I’ve never had before, with a
goose. We just like each other’s company. She nibbles my pants leg, she
bumps up against me. I talk about weeds or whatever’s on my mind. She
can intertwine her neck between my weeding arms in a way that makes it
very difficult to get any work done. And then she puts her head right on
my kneeling lap. One eye looks up at me, wide open. I pet her. She doesn’t
PGR 102
purr, she doesn’t wag her tail, she doesn’t smile; She just kinda huddles
there. This is all I know: Goose eyes are open to interpretation.
Jenny Angelacos
PGR 103
The Painter is Here
Cathy Warner
The painter is here to transform my house. He wears white like a
doctor, except he’s spattered with pale shades: cream and wheat and flesh
and almost white but not. The painter is here, the thin line of a necklace
ridging through his T-shirt, and my fingers like a baby’s want to follow the
track over the cotton, peaking at the jut on the back of his neck, around and
around like the painted horses on the merry-go-round and the gold band
that circles my finger. There is no beginning and there is no end, I sing it
every night. I gave my love a cherry that has no stone.
The painter is here with Mona Lisa smile and hair spackled gray.
He removes his splattered boots at the door, tucks in the laces and pads
over the carpet in bleached athletic socks. The painter is here. He calls me
Dear and asks where I want him to start. I don’t know I tell him. What do you
think? I think he says that you should take the baby to the park. The fumes will
be strong.
The painter is there with drop cloths and ladders and talk radio debating
global warming. Eight-foot walls that could be anything wait for his touch.
I am here in the green and the sand in the park in the middle of the morning
with the other mothers, our days ordered like a paint-by-number. I change
a diaper on a picnic table, push the dinosaur swing, and cradle a shoe that
fits in the palm of my hand, careful not to push too high or look away or let
the other shoe drop.
The painter is there with rollers and trays and five-gallon buckets.
He stirs, mixes, pours and strokes life to my walls. I am at the market, a
tiny chin suctioned to my collarbone, confronted with jars of color: plum,
carrot, pea, apricot and I can not decide. The baby on the jar smiles. He
must have a different kind of mother.
The painter strides through my house brushing big and huge across
the walls. He applies a second coat and I am at the library choosing sturdy
books for stubby wet fingers and eyes that have seen only what I show
them. The painter coats semi-gloss on baseboards and trim. He eats a
sandwich in his van, reads a catalog, calls his wife. I drive through shadows
of elm and maple past wrought iron gates down a narrow lane that bisects
rolling green dotted with marble in white and gray, words scratched in
memorial. Today I will not stop.
The painter takes one last look around, bucket at his hip touching
up the flecks he missed. Then he is in the driveway, van doors flung wide
to the world. He folds tarps, wraps brushes in plastic, hammers lids closed
with a fist. He’s done this every day. He knows his life by heart. I watch
from my car three houses down the street, fuzzy head sucking at my breast.
I wait, wait for the painter to leave to my house, but the baby spits milk in
my hair, in my lap, over my shoulder and I decide to go home, deadly
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fumes or not.
Let me help you the painter uses his library voice. He hangs plastic
bags from one wrist, diaper bag from the other and smiles at the baby while
I unlock the door. I left a fan running in the baby’s room. He sets groceries on
the kitchen counter and opens the windows. I wet a dishtowel, blot myself
and thank him.
Let’s take a look. His fingers touch my arm and he guides me into
the living room. The baby flexes his feet against my ribs. The painter sweeps
an arm as if displaying prizes I’ve won on Wheel of Fortune but there is no
music or applause, just the hollow noise of a room where draperies have
been stripped from windows and furniture piled like puzzle pieces jumbled
from a box. Is it what you were hoping for? His fingers tighten a fraction. The
scratch of slammed doors and the gray scuffs of a shoe thrown across the
room, the dent of a saucepan and the orange drip of tomato sauce that
defied Comet have vanished.
It’s the color you wanted, right? I think of the paint samples, their
tiny rectangles of whites. I can’t remember if I chose Glacial Ice, Pearl
Illusion or Winter Landscape, or if I could tell them apart if they were striped
across the walls. I look at the painter, a thread of sweat wrinkles above his
eyebrows. I want to erase it along with his memory of my walls before he
disguised them. I shift my weight to the rhythm of an imaginary lullaby
and rub the baby’s back. I have no idea what I want I say but I’m sure it’s fine.
He pats my skin and I feel it deep, like he’s painted Sympathy
Pink along my veins. Well, then. He tucks a hand in his pocket. I’ll leave the
bill for your husband. That will be fine I say. He clears his throat, pulls out an
envelope and lays it on the counter behind us. I follow him to the door.
Call me if you need a touch up he says and the latch clicks behind him. The
painter is in his van driving home to a painter’s life.
I am here in the house. I ease from room to room, the practiced
steps of a mother with sleepy cargo. The walls are white, neo or nouveau.
Whalebone or Jedi Warrior or Polar Bear; I can’t remember which. Furniture
hides mid-room under beige tarps and the carpet looks dingy now as it
creeps toward the fresh walls. Lightbulbs like ceiling mushrooms cast
shadow ghosts in the corners.
I am here in the living room and the painter is gone but he has
arranged the stack of pictures I took off the mantle. My wedding photo is
centered in its silver frame. We’re young and tentative in black and white,
holding rosebuds and baby’s breath, Mark and I. Our baby’s pictures flock
around it. That’s not how I’d displayed them, but they look better this way.
I am cornered in the house like a mouse in a box waiting for the
paint to dry, waiting for the baby to take his nap, waiting for my husband
to come home from work and leave his shoes at the door. Waiting for him
PGR 105
to tell me Everything will be okay. Wanting to believe it. The painter has
gone but I wish he were here.
Kelly Woods
PGR 106
This Is So Not Me
Natalie Server
I was climbing the stairs to Walter’s Brownstone, Ezekiel swaddled
up tight like they showed me three times before I left the maternity ward at
St. Vincent’s. You know, they’re supposed to feel better if their arms and
legs are wadded in close like the Baby Jesus lying in the manger. Seems it
would make me want to scream, but whatever. So I’m holding him next to
my chest when all of the sudden I got this urge, what if I just dropped him
right over the side of the banister. Kerplunk, like a chestnut. I could almost
see my arms reaching over the edge and letting go and that baby blue
blanket careening to the ground and me just turning on my heels. I don’t
have to tell you that it scared the crap out of me and I pressed my ass
against the brick wall the rest of the way up.
I kept that story to myself. Walter was already observing me for
postpartum stress and the last thing I need is Mr. Worst Case Scenario
breathing down my neck.
~
They’ve kept us here at the American Airlines Gate for ninety
minutes now. The most they’ll tell us is there’s been some mechanical
difficulty. Rumor is there was a squirrel on board and they’re checking the
wiring for nibbles. That sent Walter over the edge and he went for a
Courvosier on top of the Valium he took before we left. When I held out
my hand for one he looked at me with that, what-kind-of-a-mad-cow-areyou look, like it would go straight out my nipples and make Zeke a moron.
Everything reverberates to Zeke. Now Walter’s wearing out the burnt orange
carpet with his pacing and Ujjayi breathing. I told him the combination of
pharmaceuticals, alcohol and yoga would keep him blissful through any
in-flight disaster. I wanted to tell him it kept me blissful through the
pregnancy, but he is so damned sanctimonious.
I’m already regretting this blouse. I decided that since I could get
the buttons to meet over the vast continent that is now my chest, I would
wear it. Walter said the olive sized gaps level with my nipples made me
look slutty so I said good, what a great impression to make on his parents
in Coeur d’Alene Idaho, home of the Klan. Anyway, the blouse is a clingy
polyester blend and it’s itching like hell and I can feel the sweat collecting
on my spine. Zeke is lying in the crook of my elbow, spacing out on the
florescent lights, one of his two tricks, and I could just about scream from
the rubberized tights I’m wearing for varicose veins. The nursing blister
on Zeke’s top lip burst this morning and the skin flap is fluttering in and
out with each suck of breath. I’ve tried to bend down and bite it off but my
neck is stiff from sleeping weird. I used to sleep on my stomach and I was
skying on the idea I could again once Zeke was born. But the first night I
PGR 107
tried, it was like sleeping on two hard bladders and the milk left nasty,
ripe wet spots.
Some jerk over at the counter is laying into the stewardess. I
watched him stalk over there, his hammy thighs rubbing together so hard
I could actually hear him wearing out the inside seam on his Wranglers.
“What the fuck are you doing? It’s a fucking chipmunk, Chip and
Bill, a fucking Disney cartoon. How much longer are you going to keep us
here?” He pounded his fist on the light blue Formica, you know how
American tries to make everything patriotic, but not? I thought the counter
would crack, but nope. Neither did the flight attendant, she stood there
with that fake smile pasted on. I could see her Bordeaux lip liner when I
was getting our seat assignment near the bulkhead because Walter said it’s
the most comfortable place when you’re schlepping an infant across the
country to Idaho. I don’t know how he knows these things.
“Sir, I have to ask you to step away from the counter. The service
crew is working as quickly as they can and we estimate departure in the
not to distant future.”
“What the fuck does that mean. I give you fifteen fucking minutes.”
And then he pushed himself away from the counter and ranted all the way
into the bathroom. I bet he pees a fierce stream. I never noticed anyone’s
stream till Walter started pissing about his, no pun intended. He said when
he hit forty-five, he lost his power.
“I hope that guy is nowhere near the bulkhead.” Walter nodded
toward the Men’s Room, “he looks violent.”
I just shrugged. I was too sick and tired of soothing and providing
suck to deal with Walter’s paranoia. My nipples were chapped, the sutures
from my tear barely dissolved and Walter’s already been putting his head
down in my lap and mewing like a hungry kitten. I’m sucked dry.
“I could get violent. It’d give you something to talk to your parents
about.”
“Sshh, “ his eyes flickered in Wrangler Man’s direction.
He stormed back over to us and dropped like a saddlebag in the
seat directly behind me. I heard him strike a match and then smelled the
smoke. I closed my eyes, breathed in deep, trying to get a cigarette snack.
“Let’s move.” Walter whispered and cocked his head to the side
like he had a bad twitch.
“No.”
“The second hand smoke...” he insisted.
“There’s no place else to sit, besides my legs are killing me.” He
didn’t know about the smoke I had everyday at 4:30 when he went out to
get the late edition of the Times. I kept the hard pack of Pall Mall’s under
the center cushion of his leather couch. I’d take it out onto the balcony with
one of those long fireplace matches and lay on his teak deck chair. I’d say,
PGR 108
“Don’t watch Mommy,” and light up. My starved lungs soaked in the
nicotine like dry sponges. After, I brushed my teeth, chewed two altoids
and made myself a cup of green tea. I’d be at the desk when he got back,
ghosting a term paper for some Jane on “Eating Disorders in Twentieth
Century Feminist Literature.” My nerves appeased for the evening of
Walter prodding me, “That could be your dissertation, Shelby.” Yeah, if I
gave a fat rat’s ass.
Walter cleared his throat in his most professorial way, “Excuse me,
sir.”
Nothing.
“Excuse me, sir.” Walter leaned over me and tapped the shoulder
of Wrangler Man.
“What?” He fired at us.
“Um, sorry to bother you but this is a non-smoking section.” He
pointed out the Thank You for Not Smoking sign. “And the smoke, it’s not
good for my baby.”
The guy looked at him like he was a chigger, took a big drag of his
smoke and exhaled in a thick black cloud. “I don’t give a fuck.”
“I know, but we’re new parents and the second hand smoke, it
worries us. Maybe you could just walk over there” Walter pointed across
the corridor to the half dozen seats inside an oversized phone booth that
was the designated smoking area. “They have a spot for you people.” Ouch.
Wrangler Man snorted, “I’m not moving again until I get my ass
on that plane.” He dropped his butt on the carpet and crushed it with his
boot.
“Thanks a lot,” I said, craning my neck around and getting one
last big whiff. “And by the way, it’s Chip and Dale. The Disney chipmunks,
not Bill, Dale.” Walter rolled his eyes at me and placed a protective palm
on Zeke’s head.
“Ladies and Gentleman, the service crew has completed their check
and the little visitor has been taken care of. We’re cleared for boarding.
Families traveling with small children and first class passengers are ready
to board at Gate 18A.” It was such a happy voice, like she’d be dishing up
Poptarts to a table full of freckled, pintsized gymnasts.
“Taken care of?” Walter said a little too loud, seeking an audience
from the poached faces of our fellow passengers. “What, little chipmunk
Mafia with cement shoes were called in?” And believe it or not that’s what
I think is kind of sweet about Walter. His incredibly bad jokes. I heaved up
out of the chair and shifted Zeke to my shoulder. Walter collapsed the stroller
and I lumbered behind. Wrangler man had already barreled past us and
was causing a scene at the podium.
“Sir row 12 will board in a few minutes.”
“Yeah right, this row 12 will board right now.” We couldn’t see
what happened next because the passengers were herding around us with
PGR 109
their oversized Samsonite but someone escorted him on the plane. I saw
him, pillaging the aisle seats as he passed, pillows, blankets and a
Cosmo, just to look for boob shots I’m sure.
We squeezed in, stowing the stroller, the baby sling, the diaper bag
filled with Parent’s Choice award winning infant toys, bottles of frozen breast
milk, in case I throw myself from the plane I guess, and organic cotton
diapers. Yes, we use a diaper service and yes, we are carting crappy diapers
across this great land of ours. Whose idea do you think that was?
Walter let me have the aisle so I could stretch my legs out and get
up to pace every so often if my veins throbbed. Between the armrests, the
tights and blouse, my swollen feet and the pads I’d stuck in my bra, totally
soggy now, I felt like a stuffed olive. I gained fifty pounds with this
pregnancy. My upper arms flapped, even my head felt fat. Now my scalp
itched and sweat, I would have panted like a dog if it would cool me off.
“Did you remember to order the vegetarian meal?”
I didn’t answer.
“Shelby, you did remember to order me the vegetarian meal?”
“I don’t know, I might have forgotten.”
He let out a soft, disappointed sigh. He looked away from me, out
the window onto the tarmac. “Okay, let me check the diaper bag for apples
or something.”
He stood up and squeezed past my legs, bumping Zeke who started
to cry and caused my milk to let down. My boobs stung like hell.
“The captain says as soon as everyone is seated, we can pull back
from the gate.” This was repeated three times in gradually more irate tones
while Walter continued foraging and came up with one apple, a slightly
bruised banana and a stale half a bagel.
“Sit down asshole.” It was Wrangler Man.
“What,” Walter grumbled, “does he have tickets to World Wrestling
Federation or something?”
“Shut your hole.” came Wrangler Man’s lovely retort.
“Walter,” I winced as Zeke latched on to me like a roach clip,
“sometimes mathematicians shouldn’t make jokes.”
Just as the pilot ordered the crosscheck of the doors, we heard
piercing wails come down the Jetway. A man dressed all in black, like Johnny
Cash, stepped carefully through the door, his hair a fringe in front of his
eyes, his cheek pressed into the dark head of the reddest faced baby I have
ever seen.
“Holy Fucking Christ.” We hear Wrangler Man behind us and we
watch everyone lean away from the aisle, like the parting of the Red Sea, as
the man and baby pass. He made his way down petting the baby’s head
and clucking awkwardly. A flight attendant helped him get seated, the door
shut, and finally, for better or worse we pull away from the umbilicus of
the Jetway and tear through the permanent frosting of brown muck over
PGR 110
Newark.
Zeke can’t settle down from all the screaming. He’s snorting and
snuffling and the milk is getting in his eyes. Every time he re-attaches I dig
my nail into the parchment skin on Walter’s left hand. No age spots yet.
Walter has his tray down and he’s arranged the limp banana along with
the apple and bagel into a pathetic still life reminder of my failure.
Behind us the other baby continues it’s caterwauling with
impressive lung capacity. I turn and see Wrangler Man shove in earphones
and pound the buttons on his seat trying to get the flight attendant, the inflight music station, anything to drown out the baby. Another flight
attendant rushes past with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand and a baby
bottle in the other. The baby hiccoughs and screams and then is silent.
Walter sighs heavily and I close my eyes. Walter told me the name
of the hormone that releases into a woman’s bloodstream when she lactates,
his term. Oxytocin. I only wish it was bottled and sold because it put me
right to sleep.
~
Walter is twenty-five years older than I am, but I guess you already
figured that out. You probably also know that I was in his Trig Seminar
and surprise, I had to take it twice because math for me is like eating twentyfour hard boiled eggs in one sitting, which I tried on a dare in sixth grade.
I can only swallow the first six and the rest come right back up. I won’t
bore you with the details of how I ended up in this life with Zeke and
Walter, heading to meet octogenarian in-laws in Coeur d’Alene. Basically I
moved upstairs. Quit my downstairs boyfriend and moved upstairs with
Walter. I’ll just say it was another non-decision that my parents say make
up arc of my life. At least Mom and Daddy can say I married a Professor,
even if he is a Democrat.
At first I had all the time I wanted to lie around and read the Bronte
sisters. As a faculty wife I could take classes for free and I did, once. Walter
didn’t put any demands on me, he just liked me to be home when he came
in. I liked the straightforward sex. For added mystique, I had him whisper
things about pi and X to the tenth power while fornicating, his term.
Then I was pregnant and all the sudden he asked me to quit
smoking and eat 6 ounces of soy protein at each square meal. He dragged
me on long walks and encouraged me to squat whenever possible to loosen
the ligaments in my hips. This was Walter’s big chance. His first wife, who
raised Scottish Terriers, fled after ten years of watching him calculate and
avoid her. With me carrying his progeny, he took over my life and now
with Zeke here, named for his Great Uncle, attention hasn’t slowed at all.
He highlights articles about how the baby should “latch on” with my entire
areola pressed up against his soft palate and how nursing myelinates the
nerves for rapid-fire brain activity. I want to know if Zeke will ever smile
PGR 111
and he says the social smile comes at six weeks but I can’t take two more
weeks of waiting. I coo in Zeke’s face, tell him my best jokes and I get
nothing. Walter bought a digital camera so I could take a shot of that first
smile and e-mail it too him at City College, but there it sits on the
sideboard and I haven’t figured out how to upload.
When I wake up, I’ve got a string of drool attaching me to the puce
tweed fabric Velcroed to my headrest for lice control or something. I run
my hand along my face and feel a crease down the cheek from sleeping on
the seam. Still, when Walter notices me stirring, he looks at me like he can’t
believe how lucky he is.
“I ate the salad, and I saved the tuna casserole for you.”
“I’ve got to pee.” I say, standing and holding Zeke. Walter lowers
my tray table. He puts the cold lunch leftovers on it. He raises his tray. He
resettles himself in his seat. He takes the blanket and lays it over his shoulder.
He puts the pillow in his lap...
“Walter, I’ve got to pee,” I stage whisper. I’m swaying from one
foot to the other doing Kegels like crazy.
Finally he reaches out and takes Zeke, Walter’s warm hands cradle
Zeke’s innocent neck and butt. He pulls the baby into his chest with devout
attention and grace. I’m moved and nauseated at the same time.
In the wan green light of the bathroom I try to wriggle out of my
tights but I have to pee so bad I can’t hold it and a hot stream courses down
my legs. Damn, Crap. The faucet won’t stay on in the thimble-sized metal
basin so I have to keep pushing it down to wet the towels and I barely have
the space to bend over and wipe myself off. I’m turning from one side to
the other like a dog chasing his own tail and I end up cramming the
mountain of elastic into the trash. I lean back against the door, close my
eyes— This is so not me.
When I come out a baby starts to scream. It’s not Zeke; it’s the
crier.
“Shit.” Wrangler Man shoves past me and slams the door.
The in-flight movie has started, something with perky Meg Ryan,
and passengers are shooting the baby death ray stares. The man in black,
who it turns out is a priest, has dark circles of sweat under his arms and
he’s rocking forward and back in his thirty-six inches of allotted coach class
space. He’s holding the baby like you would hold a porcupine to your
shoulder. Its face is again ruby colored and sweaty. Its hair is thick as an
otter’s and black. His priest collar is all cockeyed and he has curdled spitup on his shirt.
So I ask him, “Can I try?”
“Thank you.” His entire body seems to go limp as he passes the
rigid baby to me.
I place the baby over my shoulder and start swaying and rubbing
PGR 112
his tiny spine. He must be about six months old because he can hold his
head up fine but he’s small, the same size as Zeke. He screams louder so
I sway faster and start to hum. The Priest looks from the baby to me,
creases like question marks form between his brows and I feel I’m being
tested. I look up the aisle, Walter has the headset on. He’s probably
reading and watching the movie and stimulating some brain growth in
Zeke.
“Great, maybe you can do something for that kid.” Wrangler Man
jimmies into his seat behind us, “ ‘Cuz I’m fucking tired of listening to it.”
He has three mini Jack Daniel’s and a Coors sitting on the tray table and
he’s talking loud, even for him. He latches his hairy fingers over the top of
the seat, leans in confidently, “What the hell are you doing with a baby
anyway? Get someone into trouble?” he asks the priest, a sour grin on his
face. And then, with a wink to me, “I thought they only liked little boys?”
The Priest ignores him.
“Maybe he has gas?” I project over the baby’s cries.
“My congregation brought him from an orphanage in Romania. I
think they were fed mainly sugar water there, so the formula could be
hard on him.”
“How about a little whiskey on a rag?” Wrangler Man snorts, “My
folks always used it for my kid brother.”
“Maybe it’s his diaper?” The Priest asks.
He hadn’t seen me slip my finger under the elastic at the baby’s
thin thigh when he handed him to me, “No, he’s dry. What’s his name?”
“Stanyos for now, his new family may change it.”
“Get up and let’er sit.” Wrangler Man pushes The Priest’s shoulders
forward.
Father Mathew, as it turns out, slips from his seat and I sit down. I
take Stanyos and stretch him out over my knees, skin to skin, so my flesh
presses into his abdomen, hoping he’ll burp. His cries wind down to a
whimper and the three of us hush, watching his perfect little body writhe
like he can’t get comfortable in his skin. I can feel Wrangler Man breathing
down my neck.
“Stanyos? I hope the kid doesn’t have to grow up with that for a
name. Kids’ll make too much fun of him,” he says.
I shrug.
“There’s nothing to him for such a fucking fantastic cry,” he
continues.
I can see Walter has turned to look for me and when he sees Father
Mathew standing, me in the seat and Wrangler Man leaning over, alarm
flashes across his face. I can tell he is going to get up, to come see if he can,
once again, help me.
I turn Stanyos gently toward me, his eyes are screwed tight and he
is preparing to wail again. His face presses into my belly and he goes crazy
PGR 113
smelling my milk. He immediately begins rooting around my blouse,
banging his head against me, his mouth working eagerly at the fabric.
And then it’s simple. I undue my top three buttons, raise the flap
of my nursing bra, and bring his mouth, wide as a hatchling, to my breast.
“It’s okay,” I whisper. Stanyos pulls greedily at me and I can feel the sting
of milk rushing into his mouth.
Father Mathew averts his eyes.
“Whoa,” Wrangler Man pulls back like he’s been hit. “Man. Shit.”
I hear the crack in his voice and so does Father Mathew because he asks
him if he’s okay.
“My kid brother’s name was Stanley.” And his voice breaks off
completely. “Shit.”
I feel the weight of it.
Father Mathew has his hand on Wrangler Man’s shoulder. He is
going home to bury his brother. Father Mathew murmurs of loss and
comfort as he leans over my bowed head. My husband and son are in the
aisle now too. Walter’s lips are pressed into a thin line and I see the questions
in his eyes. “It’s okay,” I mouth. Zeke is sleeping in Walter’s arms. The fine
black hair on his fontanel is swaying with the rhythm of his heart.
Behind me, Wrangler Man hacks and spits into a cup. He slides
open the porthole between our seats and I am surprised by the sun reflecting
off the fat layer of clouds. I’d forgotten what time of day it was here on this
plane, flying toward our families.
Stanyos swallows and swallows, his soft brown eyes glaze over
like he’s been waiting for this his whole life.
Kelly Woods
PGR 114
Applied Material Science
Cathy Warner
On Monday Norbert stood on the median strip against a clump of
oleander at the entrance to I-76 West. He held a decaf mocha wrapped in a
layer of bills in one hand and a cardboard sign in the other. It was 6:50 a.m.,
and the commuters, used to beggars ignored him. They caught a glimpse
of “Homeless” he’d written in thick red felt pen and stared resolutely at
the signal. A driver stuck at the front of the red light cracked a window to
extend a dollar bill, like a reluctant ATM. Norbert fed a hundred-dollar bill
into the gap, leaned close and laughed.
“I thank you. My wife thanks you. Have a nice day.”
“Wow! Thanks, man.” The driver honked and waved when his
arrow changed green.
He was new at this, and grew restless by 9 a.m., standing in the
same spot. He tired of breathing exhaust, his arm ached from holding the
sign, and he had an Introduction to Engineering Principles lecture at 10
a.m. He knocked on the window of the next car caught by a red light, and
handed the driver $700.
“That’s the last of her Hummel Collection.” Norbert pulled out
his cell phone and called for a cab. The driver sat, arm extended, trying to
hand the money back. Norbert pointed to the green arrow and waved her
on.
Tuesday, he brought a thermos, took the Wall Street Journal and his
hand-lettered sign: Help make my wife HOMELESS. He chose the Elm Street
onramp to Business Loop 160 because it was close to Midland Bank, and
Midtown Auto where he sold Claire’s car earlier that morning.
“Divorce. I need to liquidate assets,” he told the saleswoman. “She
had me served Saturday. Sheriff showed up at the faculty club, at my damn
promotion luncheon.”
“I am sorry.” She patted the desk between them and handed him
a cashier’s check. “Well, that wraps it up Mr. Porter.”
“Dean, Dean Porter.”
He stood at the median, handing out money until he encountered
a leather-skinned man, who stank of incontinence, stale cigarettes and
booze-sweat. The man took the two hundred bucks Norbert offered, but
shooed Norbert away from his corner.
“It’s been mine since Willy Jack went to the County Hospital last
month. And no corporate sellout in a suit and fancy shoes is gonna steal
my business.” He spat, staining Norbert’s pigskin wingtips.
So Norbert wandered downtown, past espresso shops, city hall
and the plaza park, handing out hundred-dollar bills to office workers and
clumps of them to the jobless and homeless.
“Thank my wife,” he told them. Claire couldn’t accuse him of being
PGR 115
materialistic, lacking a social conscience, any more.
The downtown bus fumed by with a Milton’s Department Store
billboard sporting an 8-foot Claire clad in purple bra and panties smiling
benignly. Norbert caught the University bus and was at his office by 10:30.
By Wednesday, he was running low on items to sell. He’d called a
real estate agent about the house.
The agent who sounded like Claire said, “If you sold the house,
cash wouldn’t be available until escrow closed. That’s at least thirty days,
unless you have a cash buyer, but with the price of condos in your
neighborhood, that’s highly unlikely.”
He stopped by the Credit Union and waited ten minutes to talk
with a loan officer.
“We need a week to run a credit report and process an equity loan,”
she said.
There was a Milton’s bag behind her desk and he wondered if she’d
seen Claire’s ad and bought the purple lingerie. “What about my credit
line?” he asked.
“That’s to protect against bounced checks. You can’t borrow against
it. Okay?”
He stood up and shook her hand across the desk.
She squeezed too hard. “Thanks for banking with University. Have
a nice day.”
That afternoon he rummaged through the house. He took his
Merino wool, angora and linen suits, their wedding china, her mother’s
jewelry, the TV, VCR and CD player, and piled them in the trunk of his
Miata. He dropped the suits at Village Cleaners and drove to a pawnshop
in the city.
“Want me to hold the jewelry for a week?” the clerk asked.
“No thanks. I’m not sentimentally attached.”
Norbert walked out onto the sidewalk, temporarily blinded by
the early sunset, and the sudden collapse of his marriage. He walked into
the Saddle Up Saloon through a cloud of cigarette smoke. Strains of Waylon
Jennings emanated from a TV in the corner, and peanut shells littered the
floor. Norbert laid his $785 on the counter.
“Give me a double Vodka Collins. Know anybody who needs this?”
he fanned out the bills.
“Hell, don’t we all,” the bartender answered.
“Keep it.” Norbert raised his drink. “Here’s to the equitable
division of community property.”
He drove home, alcohol curdling in his empty stomach. He didn’t
want to think about her. Not about her in their bed, legs wrapped around
some panting pony-tailed cowboy-hatted graduate student. Claire had
defended thesis boy, stood naked shouting, sweat glistening between her
breasts, while the sociologist pulled on his pants and slunk from the house.
PGR 116
“He’s a community activist. He’s forming a non-profit health
corporation for farm workers. And he wants me to be their spokeswoman.
He actually cares what I think about HMO’s restricting physician choice.
But you wouldn’t understand that. You don’t give a shit!” Thursday Norbert
got up early, sold his Miata to the car dealer, bought a bike off a fifty-year
old paperboy just finishing his Telegram route, and pedaled to the interstate
exit at Chambers Corners with a pocket of cash to give away. The Chambers
Corners Outlet Shops didn’t open until ten, and the ramp was deserted.
After fifteen minutes, Norbert gave up and pedaled under the freeway.
One hundred and twenty stores were built in the abandoned Del
Verde cannery and distribution center. He and Claire had lived two blocks
away in a white stucco duplex that shivered when produce trucks rumbled
by. He remembered the tomato sauce smell that permeated his pores on
blistering nights when the plant launched into twenty-four hour production
mid-June through September. He and Claire slept naked on the back porch.
He’d been completing his Doctorate in Chemical Engineering and Claire
modeled underwear for Milton’s and posed for Life Drawing classes.
Their duplex was now the site of Burger Bonanza, which
shimmered mirage-like in the distance as the sun began to heat the asphalt.
Norbert pushed the bike across the parking lot, empty except for a few
clusters of cars left by commuters who carpooled into the city. Lurching
from Burger Bonanza’s roof was a fifteen-foot tall reinforced-fiberglass
cowboy perched on a bucking bronco, burger held high in his free hand.
Norbert walked to the drive-up window, ordered a Diet Coke, sat on the
curb in the parking lot and stared at the cowboy. His boots were well defined
for a commercial sign. Brown, possibly alligator. Alligator like the boots
Norbert bought Claire back in July while at the Chemical Engineers
Conference in San Mercado.
He’d wanted to surprise her with the boots. Give her something
special for giving up the graduate student. It’d been hard, but by June things
were back on track. Norbert wedged cotton balls between Claire’s toes and
painted her toenails in the afternoons. He shaved her legs, washed her hair
with chamomile and lavender, and made her dinners of gazpacho and
grapefruit spritzer. The night before his trip, he stayed awake for three
hours, watching her sleep, until she turned on her back. Then he bent one
knee, resting her foot flat on the graph paper he slipped underneath. He
traced slowly with his mechanical pencil, following the fleshy pink curve
at the top of each toe, then repeated the process with her other foot. He
took a taxi from the San Mercado airport directly to Everett’s, where Everett
Houston made custom footwear for the famous and the foolish, three
thousand dollars a pair. Everett asked to see Claire’s picture. Norbert
unfolded a plastic accordion of twenty from his wallet.
“Very pretty. Strikingly like Sandra Bullock. In fact, I’ll use her
design. Your wife will love them. Come back Thursday.”
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“God, Norbert! These are truly barbaric,” Claire had said when
she pulled them from the box at the airport. Norbert had called from the
plane, wildly excited about his surprise and insisted she meet him there.
“Dead Alligator? I don’t even wear leather, you know that.”
And he did. She carried nylon and vinyl purses. Her closet was
full of boiled-wool clogs, macramé sandals, canvas sneakers and imitationleather oxfords labeled all man-made materials.
“But, they’re custom made. Guaranteed to fit so perfectly, your
feet will feel naked.”
She wasn’t impressed.
“Sandra Bullock has the same style.” He’d known he was pleading.
“Please, wear them for me.”
She didn’t respond.
“Just once.” He dropped to his knees. “I missed you,” he murmured
into her jeans, drawing the back of her legs into him.
“I’ll think about it.” She’d backed into a row of green plastic chairs.
She sat down and Norbert pulled her bare feet into his lap. He ran his
hands over her soft-denimed legs, up her acrylic sweater and stroked her
throat. She looked away from him, toward a line of people, inching suitcases
with handles and scooting bags with their feet, waiting to board.
A voice announced, “This is the final boarding call for Northern
Airlines Flight 2116 to Omaha.”
Norbert stood up to go home. “Final boarding call, Claire.” He
pulled at her hand.
“It definitely is.” She’d let go.
A car squealed away from the drive-thru window, it’s bass leaving
a trail like dust. Norbert stood up and brushed his blazer. He didn’t want
to remember. It had been 104 degrees on September 21st, the first day of
fall. The University Physical Plant went down; students had passed out in
the afternoon heat. Norbert cancelled his honors seminar and went home.
He’d been unknotting his tie, when he heard sounds in the bedroom. Don’t
think about it now, he told himself, and crossed the street. Go to the mall;
hand out money. Don’t see her with the cowboy punk, legs wrapped around
his waist, feet in the alligator boots, digging into his back.
He didn’t see the boots, finally broken-in, as Claire walked out of
the condo and into the grad student’s car. Instead he smelled burning brakes
and saw a bus, grinding to a stop in front of him. He saw the road: yellowblack-yellow striped, connecting his path to the bus. He knew Claire was
smiling from the side of this bus. She would thank him for his generosity,
for helping the homeless. She would pound on the condo door and beg
him to take her back. Norbert stepped closer to her voice. There was a
scuffing and the last thing he saw was his pigskin wingtips hit the asphalt.
PGR 118
Kearstin Krehbiel
PGR 119