Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories (15 page)

Through the marbled glass of the bathroom window aglow three stories above the alley, none of the city is visible: not the squirrel sashaying along a wire, or the birds lifting into smoldering sky, or black roofs shiny with drizzle, or the man standing across the gangway, flicking the meteor of a cigarette over the railing. The woman in the shower has squeezed shampoo into the palm of her hand and works it to a lather in her brunette hair. Her arms, slender and graceful, rise above her head as she massages the shampoo into suds, and then she ducks her head beneath the drumming water. Suds stream down her steaming body. She has turned directly toward him. In a downpour, her cupped hands lather her small breasts.

Naked

“You’re going to leave your watch on?” she asks him, as if he’s guilty of an indignity on the order of disrobing down to all but his socks.

“You’re leaving on your cross?”

It’s not a question he’d have otherwise asked, especially given the way the cross—gold, delicate, and too tiny to crucify a God larger than an ant—brushes the pale slope of her left breast.

“If you’re leaving on your Old Spice,” she says.

“If you’re leaving on your mascara,” he says.

“If you’re leaving on your road-rash whiskers,” she says.

“And then there’s your gypsy earrings.”

“I’ve put them in the wineglass,” she says.

“But you’ve left the holes in your earlobes behind.”

“And what about your beeper?” she asks.

“Long gone.”

“Not if I can still hear it beeping in my mind, in my sleep, in my…”

“Fine. I’ll take care of it,” he says, “once you do the same with your concealed weapon.”

“First take off that wire,” she says.

“I will if you’ll remove that birthmark.”

“It’s a tattoo!”

“A tattoo. Of what?”

“Dark matter.”

“Hearts are out of fashion?”

“And when were you intending to take off that paper yarmulke?” she asks.

“It’s male pattern baldness,” he says. “My father’s began that way. In certain indoor lighting I’d think he was sprouting a halo.”

“As long as it isn’t tonsure,” she says.

“As long as we’re on the subject,” he says, “I’d really appreciate it if you’d remove that sinister, androgynous hand puppet.”

“You mean ‘ambidextrous,’ right? Because if there’s one thing Lil’ Martin is not, it’s ‘androgynous
.
’ And if Lil’ Martin goes, you have to lose the parrot. I don’t care how sensitive, needy, jealous, and neurotic, not to mention obscene, it can get.”

“Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! You piece of shit vindictive bitch!”

“See what I mean?” she says.

“Well, so long as we’re on the subject, sweetheart, I’ve been meaning to mention that I didn’t appreciate it when your mother asked if I’d ever trained as a ventriloquist.”

“She was merely making conversation.”

“And darling, I wasn’t going to bring this up either, but since we’re being candid there’re the hair extensions, and the nail extensions, the braces, the Liz Taylor violet contacts, the disconcerting shadow of—”

She interrupts, “And I wasn’t going to bring up the full Groucho, but please, please, please,” she pleads, “even if I laughed at first, it’s not funny anymore, especially when you pick me up at the airport or we go out to dinner or a party. Darling, I swear I’ll strip off anything and everything to get intimate beyond your wildest fantasies if you’ll just remove that ludicrous Groucho.”

“My love, what Groucho?”

Tea Ceremony

The tentative first snow has become a ticking sleet that despite its bone-chill looks molten in the streetlights. Their shoes—his high-tops, her purple suede boots—are soaked from the quest he’s led them on, up one slushy block and down another, since they were asked to leave the movie theater.

“Are we lost yet?” Gwen asks.

“Nothing looks the same in the snow. I swear there’s this neat coffeehouse with a woodstove around here,” Rick says. “I found it by smell last time.”

“If it’s someplace you used to go with Hailey, let’s forget it. Being there would feel creepy to me,” Gwen says.

“You think I’d drag us around freezing because I’m looking for a place I’d been to with someone else?”

“You’re right, you wouldn’t want to violate the sacred memory.”

“Jeez, you’re in a shitty mood. If you think it’s my fault getting us kicked out, I apologize.”

“I was in a great mood. What’s more romantic than getting eighty-sixed for public lewdness and stepping into the first snow of the year? I loved walking in it together. Who drew a snow heart on the window of a car, and who walked away before we could write in our initials?”

“Sorry, I was freezing. I’m not dressed for this. I need to keep moving,” Rick says. “Look, there’s something open. We’re saved.”

The restaurant’s windows are steamed opaque. Inside, an illegible sign diffuses pink neon across the slick plate-glass window and the Formica counter. There’s a scorched, greasy griddle smell. The few customers at the counter, all men, eat with their coats on. Beyond the counter are four empty Formica tables.

“I want to go on record that I have never been in this place before,” Rick says. “Nor will I ever be in this place again with anyone but you.”

“You say that now.”

“I’d never be able to find this place again if I wanted to.”

“How about by smell?”

They sit at the table farthest from the counter and wedge their chairs together to study the plastic menu. Gwen opens her Goodwill fur coat and Rick unbuttons his Levi’s jacket, but like the people at the counter, they keep their coats on. An overweight waitress in a food-stained white uniform, her face ruddy with broken capillaries, shuffles over on swollen legs to take their order. The waitress waits, regarding them through eyes outlined in tarry mascara.
Sandra
is stitched in red on her uniform above the droop of her considerable bosom.

“You kids need more time?”

“I think I’ll have hot tea instead of coffee,” Gwen tells Rick. “Can I just get a tea?” she asks the waitress.

“Sure can, hon,” Sandra says.

“Tea sounds right for the weather,” Rick says. “This may be another first. I don’t think I ever ordered tea in a restaurant.”

“What about a Chinese restaurant?” Gwen asks.

“That doesn’t count,” Rick says. “You don’t order. It just comes.”

“So, two teas?” the waitress asks.

“Two hot teas.”

“That it? Nothing to eat?”

“Crumpets, maybe,” Rick says. “Do you have crumpets?”

The waitress isn’t amused.

“Just the tea, please,” Gwen tells her.

“You got it, hon,” the waitress says, and writes down the order on her pad. “You want cream or lemon?”

“Lemon,” Gwen says, “I’d love some lemon.”

“Lemon for me, too,” Rick says.

The waitress writes it down.

“How about some honey?” the waitress asks her. “We got these little breakfast honeys for toast I could bring you.”

“Thank you so much,” Gwen says, smiling at Sandra, “just lemon’s fine.”

“She an old friend of yours, hon, a long-lost aunt, or maybe a fairy godmother?” Rick asks after the waitress shuffles off.

“She’s just being nice. She seems lonely. She’s probably the only woman in here most of the time. Maybe I remind her of someone.”

“Remind her of who?”

“How should I know? A daughter she never had. Or one she did, a love child who ran away from home and every time the door here opens Sandra thinks it might be her prodigal finally coming back.”

“That would explain why she doesn’t consider me a worthy escort. You notice the evil eye I was getting.”

“Maybe she could see I’d been crying. Can you tell?”

“You look like you just came in from the cold.”

Gwen polishes a teaspoon with a paper napkin and examines her reflection in the concave finish. “My eyes are puffy,” she says.

Rick takes the spoon from her, brings it to his lips as if it’s brimming with steaming soup, and sips. “I love the taste of your reflection,” he says, dropping his voice. “I could lick it off mirrors.”

“A little over the top, but better. You’re making a comeback,” Gwen says, and takes his hand and slides it into the pocket of her fur coat. The strapless bra Rick undid in the movie theater is still balled in the pocket. The pocket has a hole in it and Rick can reach through the pocket and then through the torn lining of the coat to brush his fingers along Gwen’s right breast.

“Oh-oh,” Rick says, “this is how it started at the movie.”

“God, I was so close, too,” she says. “I blame it on that old, atmospheric theater and its velvet seats and winking starry sky. Like we’d entered a time machine to get there, the way the movies used to be. I always envied those generations that grew up making out at drive-ins instead of ordering Netflix. I wanted us to come together while Fred and Ginger were dancing.”

“Foreplay interruptus,” Rick says. “We’re both probably suffering from posttraumatic sex disruption. No wonder you got upset about a heart on a car window.”

“It wasn’t just a
car
. It was a vintage Jaguar. That was the point, a beautiful, sleek green Jag inscribed with a heart. Tomorrow morning some lonely venture capitalist is going to come out and find that heart on his car and see only my initials in it ’cause you were freezing and couldn’t wait around. He’ll think it was a message for him and inscribe his initials where yours were supposed to be, and then he’ll slowly cruise through the city, hoping for
G loves blank space
, whoever she is, to wave as he goes by.”

Sandra brings a plastic tray to their table. Arranged on the tray are two small metal pots filled with steaming water and two thick white chipped cups on matching chipped saucers. There are two Salada tea packets on a separate plate, two spoons, and a little white bowl of lemon wedges. She carefully transfers each item to their table, setting a cup, pot, and spoon before each of them, and the bowl of lemon wedges in the middle. She opens each tea packet and places a tea bag in each cup and then from her apron pocket produces two small containers of honey.

“Anything more I can get you?” Sandra asks.

“This is wonderful,” Gwen says. “I wasn’t expecting a tea ceremony when I ordered.”

Sandra smiles, pleased. “It’s just tea bags,” she says. “My mother really knew how to brew tea—real loose tea from India in a little silver ball with a chain. She’d read the leaves.”

“Really!” Gwen says. “I always wanted to see someone do that. My mother told me my Nona Marie used to read the cards. Not tarot, just regular playing cards. The family story is that it was the cards that told my grandmother her future was in America.”

“I read the cards,” Sandra says. “It’s in my family. All the women can do it. My sister Irene can read eggs. Don’t laugh,” she says to Rick. “It’s true. I read palms.”

“Who taught you?” Gwen asks. “Or did you just like know how?”

“My mother taught me. She taught me what I already knew but didn’t have the confidence for. I can show you,” Sandra says, and sits down at their table. She extends her hand toward Gwen, and Gwen releases Rick’s hand in the pocket of her fur coat, and gives her hand to Sandra.

“It’s amazing what we’re born knowing if someone just shows us,” Gwen says.

“Yeah, and amazing what we think we know when what we know is nothing,” Sandra says. “You have a warm, lovely hand, hon.” She turns Gwen’s hand palm up and lightly traces the lines with her crooked forefinger, studying them, and then looking up at Gwen, who meets Sandra’s eyes and smiles.

Sandra doesn’t smile back.

“You’re laughing on the outside, but your heart is crying,” Sandra says.

Rick feels caught off guard. He notices Gwen flinch and instinctively draw back, but Sandra grips her wrist. Gwen closes her hand and Sandra gently pries it back open and studies it again. “You two, you’re the wrong chemicals to mix,” she says, and shakes her head disapprovingly.

“Pardon?” Gwen says.

“Not a good fit, no balance. Don’t go near the ledge together,” Sandra says, and pushes herself up as if she’s suddenly weary, then shuffles away.

“Mondo weirdo,” Rick says. “There goes her tip. I think we just experienced the gypsy tea ceremony. That line about crying in your heart sounds like it comes out of
Fortune-telling for Dummies
.”

He pours hot water over his tea bag; the water in the cup turns tannic.

“My great-aunt Lucile used to look like she was reading tea bags,” he tells Gwen. “She’d put hot tea bags on her eyes when she had a migraine. She could tell the future from the spatters of bacon fat, too, and forecast winners at the track from feeling the fuzz on a raspberry.”

He sips his tea. The water that appeared to be hot is tepid.

Gwen reaches for the glass container of sugar that huddles together with the salt and pepper shakers, a squeeze bottle of mustard, a bottle of Tobasco, and a clotted bottle of catsup missing its cap around the napkin dispenser, like a little village rising from a Formica plain.

“Did you and your friends ever fill the sugar container with salt when you were in high school?” Rick asks.

“What a callow, guy thing to do,” Gwen says. She stops before pouring sugar into her cup, and instead touches the tip of her index finger to the sugar spout and then extends the sugary finger toward Rick. “Taste. Some gang of knuckleheads like your high school homies might have been messing around here.”

“It’s sweet,” Rick says. He licks the grains from her fingertips, then spreads her middle and forefinger as if spreading her legs and runs his tongue down the side of her forefinger to the webbing and laps her there. She takes his hand, sprinkles sugar on his forefinger, guides it to her lips, and sucks it. He closes his eyes.

“Did you like it in the movie theater?” Gwen asks.

“Loved it. I’m sorry we got kicked out into the cold before we found out if we could get off before Fred at least gets to kiss Ginger.”