I Smell Esther Williams (2 page)

The clock on the Hudson City Savings Bank billboard says 6:30, indicating nothing but the hands’ exhaustion—it was so thrilling five minutes ago & now that seems like another life, when all the cars accelerated down Newark Avenue like they’d lost their brakes and some of the passengers, some of the women, craned their necks in the wind and their religious medals pulled against their necks and were held rigid in the draft of the wind and the dashboard saints bared their teeth to this speed and the sky went vermillion and then purple and then deep blue and then black like four blinks of the eye and the clock’s hands just fell limp … and you wondered who out there was thinking of us, who in those houses, each with its own private radio wave, each with its own esoteric policy and testament, yellowing, friable, in some vanity case or hope chest—who out there was sitting by their phone waiting for our call, for our opinion on this evening that, like a kind of curettage, had cleaned away all feeling for what preceded it.… And here I am, bivouacked beneath the dangling plaster of your family’s ceiling, aghast in anticipation of their exotically emetic cuisine. The things that don’t matter here wouldn’t matter anywhere unless the mattering was too too basic to be located exclusively anywhere or here, I guess. But
what the fuck could that mean? There are photographs everywhere, (soldiers barbering each other in long elephant chains, gowns and mortarboards, & a cabin and outboard in the Adirondacks (?) circa ’49, golf caps, sunbonnets, stubbly white legs in bermuda shorts, fuchsia toenails)—and one seems to say, drop your buggy whip, and the next, take up the reins of finance. So how can a wistful harlequin in water color or a walnut stock blunderbuss above a mantelpiece or the deep suspicion that bridge is played here every week provide solutions to problems that aren’t even “interesting”? I bore myself on this seat. Tedium is consumable but even its monotony wears thin. Seventy-five percent of life won’t go away; fifteen percent of the time it has something to do with a dentist or a deity; and above the din of the remaining ten percent we can hear ourselves say, it’s simply more exquisite to remember having done the things than to work oneself into a lather doing them—to illuminate our hats, than to requarry the emerald mine.… (So we sat. And snacked. And they spoke.)…. What does your mother see through her eccentric pince-nez? The atmospheric disturbance is insoluble and vast. A vast plain that hangs in the air. And your sister. What could she see in that bulvon with his indelible I-just-had-root-canal face?…. My! Is this the miasma of a ruined abbey or the passed wind of a mystery man or simple stink in vehement affirmation? Or is this the fume of a cauterized bride that bites at my nostril as it had that morn on the Portuguese Costa del Sol to whose shore I fled when John Q. Nation gnashed its moral pimento loaf of conscription vs. scramming? World full of whack and silent discharge! Ah! Unmistakable prelude to more of the same! (Is it Michelle who shaves her lap?) I quietly collated several entries into conversation, discarding the bloom of the family endive patch and the inability of Wallace Simpson to wane in private for something topical, something political. “There are a lot of wooden nickels in circulation,” I noted during a lull, revealing no partisan inclination.… And I caught a glimpse of brother-in-law whose curt, eructed
expressions of disapproval were promptly reinterpreted by spouse or child and the combination of so much translation with this variety of baleful ogling made it all seem like the weigh-in for a Santo Domingan prize fight, and the clang of the dinner bell struck me as particularly apropros. Unaccustomed, as I was, to large families and their tendency to stampede, I found myself, perforce, left to seek the third floor bathroom, between whose dingy walls, the excavational capacities of a single light bulb had unearthed the wads of fungus, the tufts of phlegm and hair, and the clammy goop-covered potsherds that indicate an ancient and intractable civilization of slobs … but through whose window I can now observe the moon … the moon, the bilingual marquees, the fitful movement, the newspapers in the wind, Magda’s pillowcase and girdle, the cantilevered window boxes of anemone and myrtle, and the bridge which gently spans the Hudson like an iron hammock.… I’m not of this clan. “The raw turbot soaked in kirsch and fresh dill that you didn’t have was out of this world.” What do they mean—didn’t have? I had it. And later: “Beattie and Iredell notwithstanding, Blair was the most fascinating, the most disturbing individual with whom I’ve ever been personally acquainted. ‘There,’ I can still picture him saying, (indicating with a hand over his heart some belief or another), ‘we shall sit side by side upon life’s long piano bench whilst you turn the pages and I render the most sublime strains and our souls, crowned with vine leaves, dance that rite of unyielding fidelity, and if ever the faintest bubble of adultery rises from my pipe, remove my appendix without ether.’ ” The unfurled banner, the hail of trumpets: Smug and torpid husbands, (the call is collect, see?), I’ve come for your wives—your infinitely more interesting wives. Go back to your books. Oh! To kiss their mouths, under your noses. To feel their nipples swell between my lips, under your noses. To brush my cheek past the warm soft flesh of their navels, right under your noses. To lap the tart juices and meat of their veiny petals, right under your noses! Back to your texts, gentle husbands. To your fusty
codex!.… “Buck is off to drill for oil … Bye Buck.” “Bye Buck … so you’ll be free for awhile?” “I feel weird without Buck,” she said. “Forget your world of woes,” I suggested, shaking spit from my horn, “Buck’s a dick. He’s no brother of mine.”…. And that woman, with her Ceylonese mask and paprika-dusted apron, draws on the blackboard which her admonitions invariably conjure before one’s eyes, that “thin line between recreational gossip and basest schadenfreude”…. Ah, danke schön, mother—but our neurotic ground sloths, Hansel and Gretel, have been locked in the Plymouth all afternoon and the windows are barely cracked and the vinyl must be broiling after two hours in the Dekalb Avenue sun.… I can hear the mealworms gargling in the UPS truck that’s burst into flames and flipped across the bright privet hedge that borders the lodge hall. The custodian, his thick tongue swathed in flypaper, peeks out from behind the venetian blinds. I can see the lodge hall without my glasses—it is so crisply focused—a kind of Valhalla made of dentures and prosthetic limbs.… I reclarified, for your father, the circumstances behind our decision to marry: “See, me and my friends were out a few nights ago. We drunk about thirty bottles of Colt 45 each y’know and drove around for awhile, fucked some girls and vomited on them and we didn’t say goodbye to them when we left either. We didn’t have no jobs so.… Then I choked one of my friends to death by stuffin gravel and dog shit down his throat while everybody kicked his balls in—it was a pisser—then when I got home my mother was suckin some dago’s cock so I grabbed a beer and lied down on the couch and watched her for awhile—soon I crashed. I was dreamin a lot—mostly of fuckin girls or just rippin their shirts off and squeezin their tits and stuff—but then I had this real funny dream—your daughter’s in white and everything—they’re playin Here Comes the Bride—I’m puttin a ring on her finger—so I wake up and say to myself, it’s time—marry her, man—it’s a sign, y’know”…. Ah, what is durable and authentic? Not gardens dug up to fill sandbags. Or
barricades built of hatracks. Not the meadowlark’s final bubble surfacing in a cask of Armagnac brandy. The world seems miniscule. A dolls’ house. In lederhosen and tyrolean hats, we’ve ascended its stoop and crushed the Queen Anne furniture with our stupendous behinds. But you must return with me to assay the damage. We can wed our culpability this way. Wherever you go, you sense some wrongdoing that, like the imprint of a signet ring on the victim’s temple, slowly vanishes under the inspector’s magnifying glass. Then you feel your heart pounding once more and the hoofbeats of a blue ox seem to echo again throughout some hinterland you remember. Though perhaps nothing could ever seem as alien and as disquieting and as alluring as the sepia bluish-limned photographs of headhunters and tourniquets that one found in antique encyclopedias or as abiding in memory and dream as the severe glare of that attic patriarch with his ashen and bifurcated rabbinical beard.… I am less and less different from you, and you from that. Is this my way of saying—let’s consolidate as a people? We are a people, you and I, whose history can only begin back there—day after day. And the pleasure will be retroactive—and vast.… So I said, get your coat on. Or you told me to put mine on. And put one sleeve at a time on! I’ll try it on, I said. Then we argued. I couldn’t even get the coat on—because the coat wasn’t even mine. The sleeves were blocked up with old crusty tissues that an uncle of yours had squirreled away for a thousand years, but I capitulated because history teaches that every Napoleon has his Waterloo and here, in front of all these faces, was mine. I’m almost positive I heard someone say that I was a faggot who’d look better with an altarboy’s surplice pulled over my head as I’m flagellated across the bare ass with a scourge of rats’ tails and intestinal worms—but I may have imagined that. And I may have imagined this too, but I thought you said that I was a terrible lover, that I needed a map from the AAA to make love. And then I said, you’re not marked by stately beauty, yourself. And you put a very flammable substance down the front of my trousers
and I tried to represent words with frantic gestures & your relatives guessed Under The Volcano, The Carpetbaggers. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, Naked and Fiery Forms, No Time For Sergeants, and The Three Faces of Eve. And as quickly as it had erupted, the argument was no more. Though you’ve defoliated my tinea cruris for good, pet, our reserves for toll booths and road house vittles (a b.l.t. at the Pilgrim would suit me well) are bankrupt. But I love you. I love you. And I need you. And I’ll never leave you.… And here we are. Now it is evening again. We are riding again. On mammoth steeds. Our outlines motionless in the chintz crepuscular moonlight, propped in tandem leaps across the vacant avenue and clock, like painted figurines. You look plump and pissed-off and I’m a little nauseous & the horses seem old and complacent and bored as if all was right, right on schedule and nothing beyond the horizon of this daily to and fro … the “excuse our citadel’s appearance—we’re recarpeting the parapets” sign looks perfect, mr. total’s heirs are snug in their royal compound near Bernardsville, the nursery is quiet, where all conceits bear the imprint of the constellations the pennant’s locked up, the traitors headless, the throne reupholstered … there is the sound of transit but never the sensation of movement … the unknowable unnameable is vigilant.… but let’s be honest, are we not flung from the earth as it spins—and is this not a kind of sleep? Ah!!

Connie and Lester are down by the well. Thick rolls of toadstools spring from its walls like the powdered curls of a colonial wig. Its floor is littered with shards and arrowheads.

I still have the taste of chicken livers in my mouth, Lester says.

Kiss me with your teeth, Lester.

He steps back a few yards so as to get a running start.

Spinning stripes … make a circle, Lester says, waving his towel like a lasso. He leaps at Connie, bowls her over, and bites her calf.

Twice for luck, I say, and he clutches the other one like a drumstick and bites it.

My ass is still stiff from Mass yesterday.

Lester pokes his thumb through the cellophane bag of pistachio nuts, I love you more than anyone, he says.

In the density of limbs and foliage, veils of shadow and oblong panes of sunlight partition the thicket into a thousand pieces.

I think I’m coming down with something, Lester coughs.
He points to a stump of flowering moss. To a dragonfly.

The wind rustles the trees. Catch a falling leaf, Connie says, making herself dizzy.

Lester’s got a first rate brain, Connie says, he can do two-thirds of nine without blinking and he’s a great phone conversationalist, she says, peering into the empty thermos, and stepping on a yellow jacket.

Show them your tin cans and wire, Lester.

Don’t be a stranger, Connie says tearfully, her arm lost to the elbow in a crystal bowl of raisinettes.

Come out and see my car.

She puts her bathrobe on and steps across the yard.

There.

It looks like an egg.

See.

It smells new.

Listen to the engine, I say, turning the key.

It sounds like a poète-maudit destined to die in shame.

Don’t, I say, handing her a tissue.

I think Lester really likes you, she says.

The ground shakes.

Tanks.

I’ll tell him that …

No, look. You can see their turrets through the trees.

It’s getting …

Don’t, I say.

That night, the rebels begin shelling our village. Headlights fill the highway and rain splatters the windshields. Connie watches the windshield wipers and Lester listens to them hum until he slumps against a carton of canned goods and snores. Connie is ludicrously gorgeous in her pale wheat-colored maillot—her hair is chestnut brown, her eyes are fathomless. Lester too is ludicrously gorgeous in his pale wheat-colored maillot—his hair is chestnut brown, his eyes are closed. Connie counts one white line after another after another after another after another after another after another. There’ll be plenty of time for tennis when we reach the island, Roz says, we should sign up for a court on Wednesday for Thursday and on Thursday for Friday and on Friday for Saturday and on Saturday for Sunday and on Sunday for Monday and on Monday for Tuesday.…

And on Tuesday for Wednesday? Lester asks, momentarily awake.

Go to the head of the class, Connie says. She unpeels her third banana, let’s play a game—I’m thinking of a person … someone we all know.

Is it me? Lester asks.

Is it? I turn to Connie and break off a piece of her banana.

The road conditions and traffic have brought us to a virtual standstill.