I Smell Esther Williams (6 page)

The Japanese are an obnoxious people because they restrict the sale of American-made concentrated orange juice, but their endemic monster cinema makes our American-made psychological tragi-comedy seem like rewarmed tripe. Japanese women adulate young American men. Their jeans, their tough-guy posture, their gum-chewing delivery, their violent inability to sustain intercourse. Jan. 29, 1945: her name was Marianne Faithful and she was related to Alfred Dreyfus. She was exonerated when her nails were found barely incompatible with the murder weapon. When I returned, the body was back. Waists existed. Hips existed. There was a legginess that hadn’t been seen in years (ankles suddenly
very
sexy). She wouldn’t allow herself to get instant feedback—maybe she was enjoined by the Miracle Temple beneath the Mile High Stadium. “The door for reconciliation is not closed,” she lied, tightening the screws, as the plumbers from the Bahamas who’d taken the old Third Avenue E said “O.K., take my wife,” the other, “O.K., please eat my daughter’s remains.” I stood in front of the louvered blinds. The way to a man’s heart may be his stomach but the way to a woman’s heart is her nose. If you really stink she’ll recoil and if you start to stink, gradually or suddenly, she’ll stop loving you and she won’t even kiss
you good-bye. A fair number of Dutch settlers kissed in the seventeenth century. Later, Washington would kiss his wife. Burns says that the freezing militiamen kissed to keep warm; that the kissing was ostensibly expedient or “contingent upon field conditions.” Soon, after signing important declarations, statesmen congratulated each other with very formal kisses. I study Clint Eastwood at the Clint Eastwood Institute in Clint Eastwood, California and, later, off-campus, embrace the woman to whom I’ve shown my feelings, to whom I’ve exhibited my notion of feeling. Then, after making reference to the vivacity of a cloud up there, she drops below the surface of the earth and becomes, in terms of haute couture, “unnaturally plain.” Tuesday morning I stepped into the sun; finally my friend Marianne Faithful had mercifully disengaged or unenveloped herself from her maritimey comforter which smelled like, god forbid, some baby had cheesed on it. The sun had given her garden a facial and she looked like a person who had gone to Tulane—I had never seen such an intractably bitchy glint. I glanced at my wallet and then ogled deeper—no money. No money—no razor blades, no books about photography, I thought at first. But then I ogled deepest into it. Never before had my wallet seemed girlish, but now it was empty and dark and
very
sexy. I’ve been wondering about the thunder we’ve been having. The apartment complex is having apoplexies over this thunder. Some say it’s shifts in the layers of the zircon-belt, which girds the earth like a digital watch of doom. Some say the earth is shrinking—that we are a tenth the size we were an instant ago—that the universe exhausts itself in a series of hiccough-like contractions—that we are loitering in a minute and minuter lobby. In the future, the qualities that make for a fine waiter will perhaps be the most sought after. There will be a “Cadillac of Men”—a top-quality ideal towards which the young people will lean their shoulders. Then, the elegant, crackerjack, and ebullient, eloquent president of GE insinuates himself onto
our
dance floor, (into my mirror as I depilate my big beard), creating an epidemic of
surprise that no one gets used to, and cleans out our fridge—consumes our soup and soap, and spews his yucky phlegm into Susan’s open lingerie department. Someday, picnics will be forgotten. The very idea will lay interrred in wax museums and glass-encased exhibits. Or picnics will even become punishable offenses. For some, picnics require full course meals and linen cloths—for some, simply a rope, magazine and tissues. But all picnic people agree on one thing:
Look Out For Ants!
their famous esprit de corps can be maniacal and sarcastic in the dirtiest human way—unless you legitimately confront them, they will abuse you en masse, provided they are not preoccupied with their day to day drudgery, their sickening housework that involves, coincident with a blissful ethics of survival, a highly derivative arts and crafts. Marianne tortured her hair in front of the mirror—a coma was not her idea of “stepping out”; 10:58! isn’t my toast ready yet? The toast lay jam-side up on the sunbaked thoroughfare—about it resounded the boots of a thousand workers. The peasants came to the capital, turned into beggars within a week and went to the church to die. Why do some women still want marriage when all most husbands want to do is have a nice day? Aren’t women silly oddsmakers? As for eligible men: what about the thought of needing a ration book to get a dollop of sex a day from a stewardess or fashion model or during lunch hour on a magazine editor’s couch? I remember being much younger, fellating my chauffeur Champion during a rush hour tie-up on the Zwieback Thruway as the sun says “sayonara young American boys, don’t put morphine on a pedestal” and Champion says “Don’t fellate me with gum in your mouth—you’ll drool and it will harden in my pubic hair like stone—as stony as the undertaker’s upper lip.” “O.K. Champion,” I say, “I won’t try to fellate you and chew gum at the same time.” In the wake of so many historians and biographers, June Rossbach Bingham said of U Thant, “he inhabits a glass tower but not an ivory one” always kissing and hugging and squeezing the Mrs. with undiminished vitality. June Bingham grew up in
New York, attended Vassar, married Jonathan B. Bingham and was graduated from Barnard. When Jonathan Bingham ran for Congress in 1964, she became engulfed by politics. My houseboy Champion has friends who had a long traditional marriage and turned it 180 degrees into a new, deeper, open, trusting friendship, and recently developed a humanistic counseling program in Brazil and their child, once threatened with no dessert when he wouldn’t eat his spinach (overcooked and watery, no doubt), is today’s gourmet, delighted to skip dessert as long as he’s promised his risotto verde con spinaci—the leafy green of the spinach and the buttery mellowness of the rice bound together by melting threads of walnut-like Parmesan cheese. I called my mother to see what I should serve with that. She said that a cocktail made of morphine or heroin, usually cocaine, sometimes gin, sugar syrup and chlorpromazine syrup was used in Great Britain. “Barf!” Marianne choked when I told her, “I’m glad I’m American!” “Are you kidding?” I said, “Use of that mixture in the United States would violate narcotics law.” She averted the suspicion of my eyes, somehow. Later I yelled to her, “Dear, I’m getting the portable heater and going down into the Hole for a while.” Bruce Pesin is a perfect illustration of the brown-tongued, canting, third-rate, feckless academic. He is a discredit to our race—a shanda for the goyim. William Howard, Motorola’s director of strategic operations, cringed as he entered the commissary and saw a circle of bachelors surrounding Ms. Eggnog like a brigadoon of phagocytes. “Isn’t she a remarkable specimen?” “She certainly ain’t no guy!” someone exploded. One of the most charming ceremonies in our culture is the family dinner at which it is decided that a child needs psychological help. The milkman was over and as soon as he left I called his office and told them that
he
ought to be locked up—under a microscope even a human scalp flake can look like a stylized Navaho rug … a lot of people thought we’d be looking through Field Marshall Rommel’s goggles right now. “The hot water in my apartment takes a while getting hot so a few
days ago while I was waiting for it I was thinking about everything from auto racing to wax effigies.” “I often do that. Can you imagine—a little boy looking out at the world.” “The older you are, the better it seems.” “Oy … you’re making an analogy with enology.” “Do you want to have lunch this week?” “I want to have an affair with you.” “Oh … darling … I want to have an affair with you too.” “You do?… I want to have an affair with you too … darling.” Thursday, Feb. 2: We Are Not Alone. Saturday, Feb. 4: in a darkened movie theatre a male voice whispers, “Kiss me.” A female voice answers, “No … we are not alone.” Here’s something that shouldn’t be hushed up: condemnation of extramarital sexual relations ran about 69 percent in 1973 and 72 percent in 1977. In 1973, 25 percent of the response said that “there was no right or wrong way to make money, only easy and hard,” and in 1976 the figure was 26 percent. I’m non grata at about nine European casinos. I transferred my accounts from the Gunbarrel National Bank to the First National Bank and began courting the constellations of fortune and went home and eradicated my body stains with great brio and imagined myself in an Hawaiian island’s version of the roaring twenties. I sense in the inspiration behind prohibition a bittersweet poignancy not unlike the excruciating need, felt by some today, to have resident physicians in their households. Sweetheart, remember playing gin rummy? Someone smelled a rat and socked me and put me on queer street and, I swear to god, someone almost had an hysterical pregnancy. You said, “Sweetheart … take me out of here.” Friday, Feb. 10: went to see Cocteau’s
La Belle et la Bête
with Doc, Blitzen, Sneezy, and Rachel. The little stewardesses in back of us needed their psychic cellars dredged. Many people equate splitting the atom with balkanizing the island of Japan. This is, in many ways, a good thing, because it shows that people are not letting their thinking caps molder in their closets—that they are not intellectually agoraphobic. How can people be agoraphobic? I remember my nanny glistening above the palisades, above the crenellated
ramparts, waxing her legs, surveying all the landscapes beyond her simple smelly provenance. Had she capitulated to agoraphobia’s shifty and seductive “bargain”, god knows what the total sum of her woes would have been. It would have taken a calculator to figure out. Tuesday, Feb. 14: I left the apartment to get a Valentine’s Day gift. If I had a son, I wouldn’t let him go to parties where dykes were marathon violent-kissing. Have a son … ha!… I can’t even have plants with the lighting my apartment gets. We engender our young in the sewers, teach them to swim, hope à toute outrance (F., to the very utmost) that they persevere etc. etc. etc … the point is, they invariably dunk themselves like crullers (crullers with souls and feelings, though) in our mess. People should not love without respite—even people’s love for Fred Allen’s style of broadcasting eventually waned—and it’s about time that the young American poets took Marianne Faithful off her pedestal. One night she could be like a statue—cold and beautiful On another, she could be like a midnight snack on a Spanish galley, on another, like a radioactive mutant. A few nights ago she touched me as if she were blindfolded—as if it were a last cigarette. I was so mixed up about sex that night. If tears were worth money, my pillow would have been as rich as a Texas oil millionaire who’d just won a huge grant. In lieu of kidnapping, more and more young people are having children of their own. Mayonnaise gone bad can be lethal and I wonder if being a stewardess is the vaunted career it once was. Ms. Eggnog left me a note: “Dear Mark, Go fuck yourself. I can’t stand it anymore. They’re lulling us into a false sense of security about radioactivity.” I began to suspect some sleight of hand involving the bonds my grandparents held in escrow. I sent the little money I had left to Charo. Last night was restless—complicated problems seemed to materialize out of thin air. I dreamt of a babysitter who appeared to have X-ray vision as he gazed into a cradle. “There was an ape living in a house on a hill, blanketed with weeds,” he mentioned to the baby. “Then doctors told him he had but a year to live. The ape said, “Oh
Doctor, please put me to sleep now.” The doctor said, “O.K. Drink this claret and listen to this boring tape.” The sitter threw his wine in the baby’s face, waking it from an unconscious sleep. The baby seemed almost extraterrestrial, holding her pajama top. “Quickly,” she barked, “get me some cold water and a rag!” I passed around two rubber or golf balls for inspection. I applied a little bit of soap I had hidden under the table. I pressed the balls together. Because of the soap, they stuck together and “magically” balanced. Yesteday, as we were about to end our relationship, Marianne was crippled in an industrial accident, and I had to spend the rest of my life caring for her. Monumental hookups span the countryside; dirt roads ramify throughout the topography like varicose veins forming elaborate paraphs upon the ragamuffin arrangement of brassiere cup-sizes, and gals sell kisses on the fairgrounds, while youths languorously sip mare’s milk—good motels are being built in the distance—no one speaks English—a significant minority of women have shaved heads—distant neighbors communicate with loudspeakers—trucks deliver milk to the various institutions—you are my wife—good-bye city life. I spent all afternoon on the sofa, putting on and taking off my deodorant, contemplating suicide, sitting in the breeze, putting on deodorant, taking deodorant off. The vice-presidency is the spare-tire on the automobile of government and, unfortunately, many cosmetics and toiletries are carcinogenic, so people are wearing yogurt masks. Rivers of hamster and gerbil blood apparently coursed through the backyard patios and barbecue pits of America, according to high school scientists who admitted to fads of “afternoon research.” One kid, now a dinner pianist at New Jersey’s Westwood Club, smiled and confessed, “We killed a lot of mice … a lot of mice.” Ms. Eggnog: Your letter arrived by carrier pigeon … I didn’t care for the letter but ate the pigeon. Describing two girls, I once said, “She is the pinnacle … she is the nadir.” Little women make sharks in their briny commodes. I saw a tooth brush against my grave. I got a job at the gift and toy store and had to
say to the owner, “Your work is good—but you want to be the Nadia Comanechi of poetry.” There was an unexpected bummer on the shores of peppermint bay. She needed tampons and sent him for them. He used his razor and left it on the bathtub. He left the toilet lid up and she sat in the water.

I knew it. I’ve been feeling like a fat pig, she says, looking down at the scale.

I’m going to open the shower curtain now and show you the horse I got.