Ecstatic Cahoots: Fifty Short Stories (16 page)

“What if going to that old theater was going back in the past, and because we got kicked out instead of staying until it was over and returning to the present, we were kicked out into the past? I mean, look at this place. Think about outside, how nothing looked the same.” Gwen releases his hand and bobs her tea bag in the cup. The string slips from the staple that attaches the bag to the Salada label, and she spoons the tea bag out and presses it to her eye. “Oooh, that feels good. Great-Aunt Lucile was on to something.” Gwen places the tea bag on her saucer, and then sprinkles sugar on the lemon wedges in the bowl. “I like tart tastes. I used to suck lemons even when I was a little kid. My friends all thought I was crazy. I like how clean they make my mouth feel.” She sucks at a lemon wedge, and then inserts the wedge into her mouth and retracts her lips, giving Rick a lemon-peel smile.

He peels open a honey container, dabs out a fingertip of honey, outlines her lips, and kisses her. The lemon wedge still in her mouth blocks the probing of his tongue. Her kiss tastes of lemon oil. He dabs his forefinger in the honey again, and then slips his hand beneath the table and carefully slides it between the folds of her fur coat and up under her heather woolen skirt. When he reaches her thighs, her legs part. She looks at him and narrows her eyes. There’s the tink of her spoon as her right hand absently stirs her tea. “So you think maybe we’re like stranded in the past together?” Rick asks. The lemon peel smiles back at him from between her lips. The radiant warmth of her body defies the grains of ice slashing through the dark trees that line the curb, the sleet ticking against the pinkish plate-glass window and pocking the film of snow on the windshields of parked cars. No way would that heart on the Jag survive until morning. She slouches down in her chair, pressing his sticky fingertip against her panties, and then past the elastic so that the honey mixes with her slickness. They may have entered the past, but for this moment there’s only the present between them.

From behind the counter, Sandra locks them in a nonstop stare.

With his free hand, Rick raises his teacup to his lips. Gwen’s eyes are closed, she’s breathing heavier, nostrils flared and her lips parted, revealing a silent lemon-yellow sigh. When she slides toward his finger so that it enters, Rick whispers, “We can’t let on we’re from the future. They don’t want our kind here. Sweetheart, you have to at least make like you’re sipping your tea.”

The Question

A mime is climbing stairs. He climbs reluctantly, each leaden step an act of resignation, which may explain why, despite his effort, he’s not ascending. He no more wants to reach the top than a man mounting another kind of stage—a platform where an executioner stands waiting with an ax.

Or perhaps the executioner is seated in a portable director’s chair, puffing through a slit in his hood the cigarette meant for the condemned while stropping the blade of a guillotine that has just failed the cabbage test.

Or perhaps the stairs lead to a hangman tying a knot with the care that his wife expended just that morning braiding their daughter’s hair.

The mime climbs and climbs, but cannot conquer the three-step flight that peaks in the space reserved for him in the mercy seat.

Or perhaps … but wait!

There’s been an error in interpretation. The mime isn’t climbing. All along he’s been marching in place. Still, from his body language, not to mention the look engraved on his face, it’s clear that misinterpretation is not to be confused with a stay of execution.

Okay, then the mime is
marching
—marching down a buzzing, fluorescent corridor in the bowels of a prison, toward a gurney for an operation that requires only an anesthesiologist and a chaplain.

He is marched at dawn across a deserted square to a send-up of pigeons, and takes his place against the riddled wall that faces an unshaven, disheveled firing squad. Their hungover master of ceremonies, a captain, smelling of women, stands sipping menudo from a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup, sheepishly aware that he has just smoked the cigarette prop. Instead of a sword, the captain raises a blood-red parasol that theatrically pops open. Instead of a sidearm to deliver the coup de grâce, he’s holstered a cell phone that is carrying on its own nonstop, one-way, outraged conversation. As for the blindfold, well, each member of the audience seems to be wearing it. On further inspection, each soldier in the firing squad is wearing one, too. And yet, despite the disordered proceedings, and just before the
Ready, aim
, etc., command, the captain remembers to ask, “Any last words?”

Transients Welcome

Old Man Martin checks into a cheap hotel to die. He winks when the Desk Clerk asks how long he’ll be staying, but the Desk Clerk mistakes that to mean he should send up a woman. The woman doesn’t notice the old man’s haggard expression, his pallor, his jaundiced eyes. What she’s alert to is the man lovingly slipping his belt out of the loops of his trousers or studying her scars with too much fascination.

“What you here for?” Martin asks, his voice the backside of a cough.

“Come for sex,” the woman says as if sharing a confidence. She’s not a native speaker.

“Say what?” Martin yells, as if she’s the one who’s deaf.

“Come for sex.”

“Comfort the sick? You a doctor? I don’t want no more doctors.”

“Pesos, hole,” the woman says, keeping it elementary, gesturing that
hole
includes her flabby breasts.

“Soul? What’ll you pay? You the devil?”

“Hole!” she says, and strips off her maid’s smock.

Old Martin breaks into a demented grin. “The whole enchilada? Know the price of the whole enchilada? Holy moley!” He collapses on the bed, laughing like a lunatic, chanting, “Holy, holy, holy moley,” and drubbing the mattress with his heels and fists so that the bedsprings squeal like they’re doing it, and the picture of the ghost ship emerging from a fog of dust sails from the nail above the headboard to the floor.

“You holy, holy loco?” the woman shouts, and throws up her hands.

“Hole? You the grave digger?” Martin sits up cradling an air guitar.
You can dig my grave with a bloody spade
, he sings in a rasp befitting of Blind Boy Martin.
Oh, Lord, dig my grave with a bloody spade, but just make sure the grave digger gets paid
. He fumbles on his specs—one lens is missing, the other’s cracked—and, squinting, fishes a coin from his worn change purse and places it in her outstretched palm. “That why you dressed in mourning?”

“I’m naked,” she says.

“You the Dark Angel? Where’s your wings?” Martin grabs her arm and tries to claw the coin back from her clenched fist. “Give it up, you damned imposter,” he’s shouting. “That’s my life’s savings.”

She tears away, slams out the door leaving her smock behind, and races dizzily down the spiral of back stairs,
Holy, holy, holy
looping her brain. She can’t say why she’s sobbing. The life’s savings has seared her fist shut so tightly that she can feel the face stamped on the coin. It’s her face, and on the tails side there’s a heart, her heart, wreathed in flames like the Virgin’s heart in holy pictures. Heat scalds through her veins and renders fleshiness down to sinew. Body supple again, scars erased, lacquered with tears and sweat, she busts out of the sheet-metal door, nearly knocking it off its rusted hinges.

In the alley, men are drinking rotgut between wars. Their rap anthem whines as they debate the day’s pack order of has-beens, coulda-beens, and wannabes. They’ve been one-upping one another’s bullshit tales of conquest as if auditioning for the
Poontang Monologues
. Whatever her native tongue, she’s had to become fluent in the dialect they speak. They gape as if at an apparition. Before she can whirl back up the stairs, she’s tackled. There’s no confusion here between whole and hole. They want most what she conceals and when she won’t unclench her fist, swearing she can’t, one of them smashes a bottle against the banister, and one opens a straight razor, and another slides a bayonet out of a cowboy boot.

Her cries echo and dim along twenty-watt corridors.
Holy, holy, holy.
Old Martin starts from his nap. In his dream of fog and dust was the voice praying so fervently his own? He hugs himself in the nest of soiled sheets. The mattress smells of urine, the pillow of hair. He tries whispering a prayer into the megaphone of an empty water glass, and the water glass fogs, as does the dusty window and bureau mirror. He presses the glass to his ear and hears what’s left of his breath awash in a seashell. Out at sea, lost in fog, the ghost ship with its cargo of souls plows toward the lonely ringing of a distant buoy.

The Bellboy stands on the other side of the door pressing a cell phone to his ear. He’s a Filipino kid whose bleached hair ponytails from beneath a bellhop’s hat. His faded red uniform recalls the hotel’s grander days. He looks as if he just might shout,
Call for Philip Morris!
Perhaps, beneath his makeup, the Bellboy is older than he appears to be. The Desk Clerk, who has misinterpreted Old Martin’s rejection of the woman, has sent the Bellboy.

“Ahoy?” Old Martin shouts into the water glass as if it’s a disconnected rotary phone. There’s no dial tone, though the ringing in his ears continues to grow louder.

“
Amor
,” the Bellboy answers, and tries the doorknob. Locked. Locked out is the other side of being locked in. The Bellboy has learned that lesson at every reform school that’s reformed him. He’s learned it on Rikers Island, and learned it again here, where working has resembled explicating a trope: the body is a hotel. Transients enter, becoming guests. Until they arrived, the Bellboy was unaware of all his vacancies. He thought there was only one room available. When the deadbeat guests refused to leave, it became obvious there were other, secret rooms. Instead of checking out, the guests moved down a corridor lit by a red
EXIT
sign and lined with unnumbered rooms that didn’t require keys or maid service; rooms that call for Philip Morris. The closer to the
EXIT
sign, the smokier and smaller the rooms, until they are too narrow for anything but bedbugs, an ashtray of butts, and a single guest who lies with his arms crossed over his chest, puffing smoke rings through a whistling hole in his throat.

“
Amor
,” the Bellboy murmurs, ringed by a smoky fog as if he is swinging a censer, like an altar boy in a surplice of incense. “
Amor
,” and a voice behind the door answers, “
Amen.”

“More? I’ll give you what I got, just stop dinging that bell,” Old Martin says into the water glass. He unclasps his change purse and extracts the rosary he was saving to braid through his fist. What use is a rosary now that the coin he was saving to light a vigil candle has been stolen? On his side of the door, Martin inserts the cross like a key into the keyhole, and works the beads out behind it.

The Bellboy drops to his knees and cups his hands. If not a miracle, then a rosary worming from a keyhole is, at least, a metaphor. A rosary begins and ends with a cross. Fingertips trace the beads as if treading the Via Dolorosa from one Station of the Cross to the next. Even in fog you can’t be lost once you understand the journey takes you from Station to Station. The Bellboy puts his lips to the keyhole and whispers, “
Gracias.”
With his ear beside the keyhole listening for a reply he can hear a muffled bong of clappers, a window imploding, and the thud of a body reeling against the walls. The bells of St. Martin de Porres, the looted church across the street, haunted by a priest said to have hanged himself after being accused of molestation, are tolling.

Kneeling beside the broken water glass, Old Martin, his head pounding apart with each concussion, plugs his ears. On the back stairs the Bellboy has arrived at another Station of the Cross: the Maid, scourged, her throat peeled back like sliced liver. When he covers her with his velvet jacket and braids the rosary into her hair, the severed hand beside her opens to offer him a coin. He would refuse it were it not stamped with his face on one side and a cross on the other. Shivering, his guts cramped, he carries her down the stairs into the furnace room where he sleeps, and slides the spike into his vein, and nods back against the furnace, which clangs through the corroded pipes.

When Old Martin regains consciousness the fog has settled in his chest. Blood is crusted around his nostrils and ears. His battered cardboard suitcase sits unopened on a chair. An envelope has been slipped under his door, a message from the Desk Clerk: Will he be paying the bill for another night?

Better answer yes, Martin thinks, I don’t have long, but this might take more time than I figured. He draws the shade like pulling down the night.

Since the Maid vanished and the Bellboy has stopped answering the bell, the Desk Clerk doesn’t sleep. Maybe they’ve absconded together. On top of everything else the furnace has died and the plumbing is backed up, no doubt thanks to the bag lady in 1414—actually 1313 if the hotel allowed unlucky numbers. She claims disability but skates on her walker like a Roller Derby queen through the alleys at night and, contrary to hotel policy, sneaks in strays. The cat litter she’s been flushing down the toilet for years has turned to concrete and the hotel is constipated. His bowels feel like concrete, too. The Desk Clerk shakes the bottle of Pepto-Bismol as if he has the bag lady by the throat. He chug-a-lugs, then from the corners of his mouth licks what looks like rabid foam. He was told that when he was a child with a stomachache he called the medicine Pepto-Dismal. His lips have calcified into the grin of a clown.

Too many worries, too much responsibility, and now the Desk Clerk must perform the Maid’s and Bellboy’s duties as well, and do so with the proper air of dignity so as not to seem to be a Desk Clerk demoted to a lesser office. No labor is as exhausting as that which one feels is beneath him. The buzzing bismuth-pink neon sign that hangs in the lobby window flickers its letters across the Desk Clerk’s body:
TRANSIENTS WELCOME.
Soon the flickery buzz of neon will be the only heat left, he thinks. And that old man who checked in earlier concerns him, as well. He’s not as transient as some the Desk Clerk has seen and could be trouble, like that priest who checked in long ago and who continues to reappear, leaving a slick of Extreme Unction. What does the old man want? Not a woman, not a boy.