A Change of Skin (7 page)

“Twice I made love to you, because I thought you understood.”

Understand? You spent your days in Falaraki that summer and on into the soft Mediterranean autumn looking for beach pebbles. You became almost a tradition: the blond American girl who sought colored stones: Klondike Lizzie, the Pebble Rush.

And one day the sun did not come out. One day in November the little bay ran its waves agitated and cold against the shore and the sea became slate-gray and saltier than usual—you could taste it on your lips—stirred up, threatening. The fishermen decided not to go out. There was only one old man who stood far away on the rocks, flaying, under the rain, a dead octopus. You went to the empty beach because you wanted to swim. Javier trailed along some distance behind you. The rain wet his turtle-neck sweater and his corduroy pants and his bare feet sank into the once golden, now dark sand. You swam to the rock where the old man was flaying the octopus. You stretched your arms up from the water and the old fisherman grinned and threw the octopus down to you. Slowly you swam back. Everything seemed predetermined

“… as though you were living out a pact, Ligeia…”

and the white cat came from the house buried in the sand and waited for you, drenched and shivering on the sand

“… and you came out of the sea, Ligeia…”

out of the cold water, Elizabeth, with the black arms of the octopus twined around your own arms and your nude breasts. You stretched a hand and the cat moved to you and you lifted it up and placed it on top of your head and slowly, illuminated by a rose and ocher light that revealed all of the serene, almost static contours of your brown and blond figure crowned by a cat, you walked to Javier.

*   *   *

Δ   Dragoness, just look at the day we are living in. Here you have it in the paper. Dated Pittman, Nevada. Crime of passion in which the weapon was a two-motored Cessna. Three victims who were inside a bar, while the target of the deed was untouched. John Covarrubias (hey, a compatriot!), thirty-eight years of age (more, a contemporary!), had a violent argument with his wife in a bar during the afternoon. In Pittman, Nevada. He wanted to effect a reconciliation and have her return to live with him, and when she refused, he became blind with fury and went and got his Cessna, flew over the town and dived at the bar. Missed. Destroyed two cars in the street, swiped the bar and injured three of its seated clients, and angry Mr. Covarrubias was killed but his good wife, who had just walked off down the street, was merely shocked and survived to live happily, we may suppose, ever after. And so it goes, sweet Elizabeth. Once you begin to monologue over the skull of Yorick you discover that the Dane's doubt is the only way to affirm the elemental truth that we are, yet we are not; we were, yet we were not; we shall be, yet we shall not be. Now you see me, now you don't: boo. That is: there is a state of nonbeing that summons us continually whether we are feeling terror or laughter or insanity. And we like to play games with it, but who knows, suddenly we may be only playing our role in earnest, our eternally present and eternally denied possibility of nothingness. Well, not everyone takes that step. The risks are too great. The devil takes you, or your name is Rimbaud. Which makes me ache with boredom, Elizabeth. And to return to you and yours, if we are ever going to know who Javier is and why he is, we must go back and remember and let him go back and remember. There is no other way, however tiring you find it as you sit in the rocker in your damp-smelling hotel room in Cholula and say to him: “You're exhausted, Javier. So much talk always wears you out. Why don't you lie down?”

Your husband pays you no attention. He unzips his little leather bag and one by one places his bottles and vials on the narrow glass shelf held by two nails above the washbasin in the bathroom. He sees himself in the mirror there and in a low voice asks, “Don't you want to unpack your things?”

“What? I can't hear you.”

“I asked if you don't want … oh, nothing.”

He places his shaving mug on the shelf, lifting it by its handle, and then puts the white-bristled brush within it, the silvery straight razor flat beside it.

“Ligeia, listen. The party was just about over…”

“What?”

“Worn down, tired, nearing its end, though the moment had come, as it comes to all parties, when those still present could believe that it had never begun and would never end. But to a newcomer just arriving, to me as I arrived, it was clear that the party was almost over.”

He stands in the door of the bathroom looking at you and you say wearily: “Please, Javier, please. I know that old story. We both know it. It's past, done for, a closed chapter. Please don't go through it again.”

“They greeted me with a certain coldness precisely for that reason, because I knew that it was over and they didn't want to know.” He goes back into the bathroom and continues talking while he takes out bottles and places them in a row: the cologne—Jean-Marie Farina; the eyedrops; the Alka-Seltzer. Then his manicure tweezers and the bottle of Vitamin C tablets. The capsules of Desenfriol. “Yet they pretended gaiety, to be receiving me as a kind of prodigal son, the latecomer who could be forgiven because his arrival gave an excuse to go on, put on another record, look for an unopened bottle. But after a few brief and intoxicated words they abandoned me. Left me to my own devices and I searched for a clean glass and ice and something to drink.”

The tortoiseshell comb. The bottle of deodorant. The round celluloid package of condoms wrapped in gold paper.

“Ligeia.”

“What, Javier, what?”

“I forgot my toothbrush and toothpaste.”

“So?”

“I can't brush my teeth. Why don't you take care of these things? Now we'll have to go out to a drugstore.”

“If there is a drugstore.”

“What?”

“If there is one, such a luxury as a drugstore in this damn place.”

He laughs quietly. He goes on: “I couldn't find a clean glass. I had to be satisfied with one some girl had used and had left marked with lipstick. It was given to me by the hand of a girl I couldn't see. Only her hand, her arm…”

He raises the opaque bottle with the green label and reads: 10 mgs. hydrochloride of 7-chlor-2-methylamine-5-phenyl-3-H-4-benzodiazepine oxide, with excipient 190 mgs., following the formula of F-Hoffmann-LaRoche & Cie., S.A., Basel, Switzerland. He places the bottle on the shelf.

“… her hand and arm and the drink she held out to me. Amber liquid. Ice that had almost melted. The rim stained with her orange lipstick. A copper bracelet on her wrist. Are you listening?”

“Yes, Javier, I'm listening.”

“The record player was playing and in the living room several couples were dancing. Someone had turned off the lights in the hall. I couldn't see her face in that broken, dim, flickering light. I could hear her voice singing very softly and I tried to imagine her orange lips, her invisible smile…”

Sitting in the rocker, you begin to hum. Finally the words come back to you:
It's the wrong song, in the wrong style, though your smile is lovely, it's the wrong smile
 …

Again he is reading: Each troche contains 1.18 mgs. of Tripluoperazine cyclohydrate, Isopramide diiodide 6.79 mgs. Mode of administration: oral. Dosage as instructed by the physician. To be dispensed only by the prescription and under the supervision of a physician licensed by the Department of Health and Assistance.

“Her voice was sugary and so very low that I could hardly hear it against the hidden voice from the record player. Presently she stopped singing and spoke.”

“Hello. You're very handsome tonight.”

“Yes, that's right. How did you know? I took her hand and drew her near me and put my other hand on her naked back. One of her arms went around my shoulders and the other dropped for me to take her wrist. We began to dance, dancing…”

You sing quietly: “
You don't know how happy I am that we met. I'm strangely attracted to you
…”

“… very slowly, hardly moving, our bodies touching lightly and then separating. I could see her face now in the faint light, but not clearly. To have seen her clearly I would have had to step back from her and I preferred not to but rather to discover her without my eyes, a warm and elemental discovery of someone more forgotten than unknown.”

Javier lifts the bottle of Stelabid that he is holding and places it beside the reflection of his face in the bathroom mirror. You come into the bathroom and are reflected behind him. You look down at one of the bottles: Oratic acid 55.80 mgs., Xanthine 6.66 mgs., Adenine 3.34 mgs. Excipient c.p.b. 250 mgs. You put the bottle on the shelf.

“I didn't speak to her. I was afraid that anything I said might only provoke her to laugh. Or that she, like me, would be able to speak only in clichés. So I kept silent. I closed my eyes against her cheek and felt her warm young breath and the vague fragrance of her high breasts, which as we separated from the embrace of dancing were illuminated by the flickering light. It drew her profile…”

You take off your blouse and hang it over the back of the toilet. With your hip you push Javier to the side of the washbasin. You turn on the water.

“Is there any hot water in this hole?”

You dip your fingers into the gush of rust-colored water.

“Cold. Of course. What can you do? Give me your razor, Javier.”

“We looked at each other. I saw her dark eyes, her eyelids long and thick as an Oriental's, her orange lips, the deep hollows in her tense cheeks, the lightly tanned skin…”

You cock your arm over your head and begin to soap your armpit.

“I held her in my arms. I could see her then and forever.”

“Forever?” You furrow your brow with concentration and scrape the razor carefully across your armpit. Javier embraces you around the waist. He touches your breasts. “No!” he says sharply. “I tell you it's all over, past and gone, done for! There's no going back to it. That record has finished.
There's someone I'm trying so hard to forget.…
” “Javier! Damn it, you've made me cut myself!” You put your fingers to your armpit and show them smeared with blood. “Give me some of that cologne.”

“I went back to the table where I had left my glass. I couldn't find it. I looked exactly where I had left it, but it wasn't there.” He empties a squirt of cologne into his hand. “And then I looked, standing there, motionless, for the girl…”

“Please, Javier, hurry. I'm bleeding.”

He rubs cologne in your armpit. The armpit of Señora Elizabeth Jonas de Ortega.

“Ouch! It burns.”

“I tried to find her among the couples who were dancing slowly to the music of a new record. I remembered her waist, her cheek, the lobe of her ear, her smell. I remembered that we hadn't spoken, that I had not said a word, that it was over, gone…”

“Javier, please get back out of the way and leave me in peace.” You begin to soap the other armpit. Javier leans against the wall. A wall of unevenly set tiles that here and there were once plastered. A
plus
in application, you grade him silently.
F minus
in conduct.

“No, it wasn't like that, Ligeia. Not like that. I've been lying.”

Singing softly,
“You don't know how happy I am that we met,”
you shave yourself.
“I'm strangely attracted to you. There's someone I'm trying so hard to forget. Don't you want to forget someone too…”

“Listen, Ligeia. Will you promise to be quiet and listen?”

“I think it's starting, Javier.”

“What's starting?”

“My period, dope. See if we brought some Kotex among your medicinal treasures.”

Javier opens the little leather case again and searches through the cotton, the adhesive tape, the gauze, the bottle of iodine.

“No, we didn't bring any.”

Angry, you stop and stare at him. “No Kotex? Go on, make poetry of that.”

“You should have taken care of it. You know…”

“But we didn't forget any of that crap for your nerves. The pills that merely poison you more.”

He grabs your shoulders. “I'm a sick man. I need my medicine.”

His hands are hurting you and you make a face but go on calmly: “Bullshit, my love. It's all in your mind. Every doctor tells you that. It's all…”

“The doctors don't know everything!” he begins to shake you violently.

“Javier, you're hurting me.” You relax, let yourself go limp.

“I know when I have a pain and when I don't have a pain!”

“All right, Javier, of course you know.”

He releases you finally and you squeeze yourself with your arms.

“Give me a little of that cotton, Javier.”

Javier carefully pulls loose a handful of cotton and gives it to you. He leaves the bathroom and in the mirror you see him go to the bed and lie down. When you too leave the bathroom and walk across the squeaky boards of the bedroom, he rises again. You fall on the bed. You have been in that cheap room only two hours and yet you have already found two fleas fat with blood. The two splotches where you crushed them smear the wall above the bed.

“We should have gone straight through to Veracruz, Javier.”

“It wasn't I who insisted on seeing the ruins. For my part…”

“And that story of yours bores me terribly.”

He watches you stretch across the bed, and he thinks that, despite everything, your waist is still as flexible as a reed. What reed? It would be a pedantry, he tells himself, to remember its scientific name. Nevertheless, he murmurs, hoping that you do not hear him, “Phragmites communis.” Well, Dragoness, man does not live by bread alone, and especially Javier doesn't. He commands himself again to be silent but already and automatically is giving the old definition: “Un roseau pensant…”