I Smell Esther Williams (7 page)
Read I Smell Esther Williams Online
Authors: Mark Leyner
He opens the shower curtain and the horse sticks his head out.
His name is Cote d’Azur.
Here have a carrot.
I’m sorry you brought up words that end with -facient. I can’t think straight …
He bangs the soda machine.
Damn!
You shouldn’t have gotten such a large bucket of fries—we’ll never finish them.
I can’t afford these repairs y’know.
She nods.
They both look under the hood.
There goes my between jobs vacation.
You’ll have to work between jobs this time.
He fumbles for his keys.
Are you decent? he asks.
I was jerking off in the shower and I came before I was even hard.
There’s a long stem running through the penis …
Let me help you with those, he says, taking the wok in his arms.
They get on the escalator. He’s one step beneath her.
… well, she says, it’s a long stem and if it gets a bubble in it you can just come like that, I guess.
They reach the top and look out across the panorama.
This is horse country. Liz Taylor rides here.
These shoes give me a blister.
She throws one across the hall.
He steps off the bus, into a puddle.
Where’ve you been?
I missed my stop, he says.
Well, you get something to drink, I’ll serve the spaghetti.
I want mead, he laughs.
She leans over and he cups both her breasts in his hands.
That doesn’t look like you.
It was taken four years ago. Here, let me see.
She gets up to pay the check.
Doesn’t your father know anyone with pull?
Her voice trails away.
He snuffs out his cigarette and dries himself with her bathrobe.
What about substitute teaching?
He addresses another envelope.
Messrs. Bad and Worse.
He makes a fist and looks through it.
He squeezes his fist shut and she takes off her sunglasses and dives into the pool.
He gets on Cote d’Azur and rides away.
Everyone goes home.
He rides back.
Where’d everyone go? he says.
Now, I’m the instructor. And a fucking good one! No lackey or flunky or major-domo, miss transparent thing. Look at those azalea—where a rumpled tabloid perches now—and tell me which members of parliament are homosexual. Look at the gardenia. And you said you loved me. What a grand and condescending gesture that was! Ain’t that the beauty of it all, the metal globe filled with a rabbit’s breath. In other words, You are the Institute. And I’m the instructor. No lackey or flunky. My mother left me. In a bowling ball bag. In the bullrushes. Of the Passaic. This is an eeeklogue. Your sister is internationally famous. She’s got a shoulder spasm. She’s got a leech under her tongue. And a steaming place between her legs. And she went for me. And I swooned. Literally. I lost all breath. Oh you sweet thing. You hot thing, I managed to gasp. She asked me if I liked to watch people leak. You mean urinate—take a leak? No, leak. Leak. Like a pail or a dam. Anywhere. Wherever you go. Eeeklogue comes from eclogue, a dialogue between shepherds. And eeek is from the comics. And eeeklogues are made of the nervous, desultory chatter that characterizes the lull of impending catastrophe. They fill balloons like talk in comics. They rise out of a stadium that many people make. The wind flattens Connie’s skirt against
her legs as she hops out and capers carelessly about the disinfectant silo.
How appalled you were when you got your sacks and paid your bill. How appalled you were when, amidst the flurry of gear-shift, clutch, and gas pedal, I buried my face in the silky pell-mell of your strawberry blondness. To return the gland to England. To prod her insides with this fragrant banderilla. The reviewing stands are trimmed with pennants and bunting … the maximum leader is photographed in shirtsleeves and gabardine slacks. This pillow is a map that smothers women. Spring is here. Why doesn’t my heart go dancing?
Interestingly enough, I starred in “South Pacific” for two years before negotiating oil rights with the Shah of Durani and then performing delicate eleventh-hour dermatological surgery upon Birgit Nilsson at the Gloucester County College Hospital in Sewell, New Jersey, and now I’m writing about Sally.
To 50% of you, that proportion which does not know me—that proportion of you to whom I am a total stranger, “Sally” shall refer to Rachel Horowitz my girl friend in actual life. To the other 49%, those of you who know me on a personal basis, through correspondence, those of you who are even familiar with me solely on the basis of telephone calls (“Hello, Baseline Toyota?” “No, you have the wrong number.” “How’s Wednesday look for a thousand mile check?” “Wednesday looks crowded. How’s Friday for you?” “Super.” “Bring a change of clothes.”) “Sally” simply represents an obsessive gesture in the metalanguage of “naming,” in other words, a kind of distant love—a real doll—a ghost with a winning smile, who I’d like to have visit me over the Columbus Day weekend—that’s the weekend of the 8th.
Sonny Liston remodeled my nose in the fifth round in a Las Vegas ring.
I wrote a monograph on bubbles and then became the proprietor of a ginseng establishment and my best friend is some clam from Cheyenne.
Yesterday, the 13th of September, a conference was summoned to London to settle a new map of the Balkans. It became evident by lunchtime that Austria’s prime object was to deny Serbia direct access to the Adriatic. And, of course, behind closed doors, Austrian ministers’ jingoism waxed turgid in the grand huff and puff manner. The resolution of Austria to keep Serbia out of Albania was matched by the determination of Russia that the Serbs should be given this access to the sea. It was so silly! By 2:00 P.M. Europe was brought to the brink of war and by 2:30 P.M. war was averted. Like ad hoc big brothers, the Germans exercised a moderating influence over the Austrians, the English over the Russians. Hardly was the ink dry upon the settlement than acrimonious quarrels broke out among the very political “siblings” themselves. The ramshackle state of European stability reminds me of the state of Sally’s furniture. The edge of her bedroom dresser is marred. The wicker is broken, and the vinyl worn on her dining-room chairs. The cushions are worn on her couch and plastic tubing in the welting is coming out of the corners. The legs on the dining room table are loose and need regluing.
Sally —
I don’t know how to title these times—perhaps “The Contamination of Happiness” or “Bewildered, and Bereft of Fun-times” or maybe “Here Comes Hell Again!”—I miss you so much I want to have fits. There’s no news—only a revolving span of drudgery and discontent—barely marked by the passing of the days which speed by with the swiftness of a buried ton. The people I meet might as well be on the moon. I keep thinking, and each time as another realization, what a wonderful
superb person you are. I just want to be with you. Maybe this weekend I’ll put the pen to a cheerier letter.
All my love,
Mark
The Boston Celtics put me on waivers when I manifested the stigmata of Christ—I couldn’t shoot without discomfort. I’m an Irish raconteur and I entered the Story Fest in order to win enough cash to buy Sally some new furniture. As soon as the judge said “Go!” I had to render flies in three different ways:
“I’ll teach you the abc’s of dance,” I said and Sally said, “We gotta get some zzz’s” and I began to shimmy unavailed upon, but then, at the western portico, a head popped up and we both saw it, you know what I mean?—and we just knocked that expensive oeil-de-boeuf style window right out in our enthusiasm to intercept the mannerless guy.
“I am zee zinger who zings at Anthony’s Abattoir Sur La Mer,” he said, bowing crisply—and his back crackled.
“Perfect” I said, “Now we can certainly dance, see—he’ll sing and we’ll dance.”
“Nix” Sally said, “Shall I hit the hay alone or will you join me?”
“Loosen up,” I suggested, doing a few quick squats, nipping at her tail at each descent.
“I run tomorrow in The Big Stakes you randy lunk—lemme sleep.”
Needless to say I did everything to keep her up including putting flies on her behind. I didn’t go to the event the next day but ascertained via reliable source that she ran like molasses.
The next night after another scene, I vowed to sell her—“I’m through with horses,” I adjured. I took a whore’s bath, zipped over to the club and in the enthusiasm of my watershed pledge, I split a card in two, sideways, and burst about four thousand seven hundred balls in ten hours of continuous shooting.
I was a bit hard pressed as I approached the second way:
The guerillas are the fish —
the people are the sea …
“No, no!” the judge shouted, “You got the fly motif not the fish motif. Get lost and don’t come back!”
With the sangfroid of an oyster on Sunday, I accepted the nonetheless unpalatable notion that I had been foiled. I suppose I’m really quite frightened of flies.
I vant to be as mysterious as a voman.
Dear Mao,
I hope the people in heaven are real together. If they’re not, I know you’re organizing them.
Sincerely,
Kathy
The workers in the old factory were laughing so much! Someone had just told the funniest joke! “A Yankee goes into a drugstore to buy condoms. ‘I’ll have a package of rubbers,’ he says. The druggist takes them from the shelf, ‘That’ll be $3.50 with tax.’ ‘I don’t want the ones with tacks,’ the Yankee says, ‘I want the ones that stay up by themselves!’ ”
“You know, you look too nice to be in a dump like this. What brought you here?”
“You’re a queer one, you’re young,” she said. “Love brought me here.”
She laughed, and the laugh was harsh with the hint of tears behind it. She threw back her head, and touched the rose in her black hair. She had a lot of hair.
— from
Confidential
by Donald Henderson Clarke
You see me with my sunglasses and cigar at ringside—then in the morning—it’s the 14th of September—I had bought a purple toothbrush to clean my tongue and imagine a voluptuous coed—a pouting libertine in men’s pajamas—a girl paring her eyelashes with the scissors my father had used for his nose hairs—a Hoffritz scissors! Some cowboy told me an eastern scissors won’t cut at this altitude … who do they take me for? Do they want to see me cry like Jackie Coogan in “Toyota Sally”?
(This section should be read like a Jewish Haggadah.)
I began to think of my employees as students—two of whom were intrigued by the image of a hypertrophic drummer beating upon a bus-like gong. The re-juxtaposition of words, that is, simply, the manipulation of language, from a position within the matrix of a consumer society, (such as U.S.A.), or from within the matrix of a draconian society (such as ours) is an analogous operation to one which I undertook a number of days ago and which I wish to render: I awoke on the morning of the 10th of September and divided my body up into square centimeters and upon each cm. applied a different cologne—in point of illustration, upon one nearly matted area beneath my pitching arm I daubed what is commerically known as “Canon & Common Law”—a fusty bouquet with the slightest hint of sherry and damp tweed; upon the raised demarcated square at the base of what Sean Michaels calls the “milch pimple” I applied the somewhat rousing fragrance of “Turkish Scimitar.” At any rate, each of the thousands of square cms. was “bathed”—as it were, in like fashion. The experiment consisted of, procedurally, simply this: entering a full early-morning bus and evaluating the response, particularly the distaff response to, first, the cumulative effect of the odeur and secondly the particular effects of each “flesh-tag”, as it was exposed to the air. I was at the time completely unaware of the fact that similar experiments conducted in
Quebec City under the aegis of the Canadian Royal Academy had resulted inexplicably in epidemic-style outbreaks of (with each affliction a drop of wine should be poured into the plate) Bugger’s Itch, Bilge Mouth, Fad Dieting, Listless Advertising, and infrequently, Ridiculous Judicial Appointments. The bus rocked back and forth like a buoy and before I could collate any substantial data a behemoth percussionist had set his giant mallet upon the top of the bus and its metallic richness resounded throughout Boulder calling all writers to work. Boulder’s a writer’s town; its streets bespeak the tangled strains of the raconteur’s spiel. “Sally” I said to the girl sitting next to me, “Is that my wallet you have? Do you have any relatives with irritating habits? Is an olfactory art plausible?” Just then we careened into the old factory—the place where great literature is made—the place where many of the great classics were written including, most recently, Thelma Strabel’s
Reap The Wild Wind
and my own “In Susan.”
She insisted upon reading and re-reading “In Susan” and talking technique.
She pointed to my nose. “Run into a hammerfish?” she asked.
The next morning I wrote her a note:
In response to your question—how well do we know Susan—it seems to me that the question should not be—how well do we know Susan vis-a-vis the notion of character qua character—but how well do we “know” Susan qua Susan—a question which synecdochically raises the corollary—how do we “know” “In Susan” qua “In Susan”—at which point, the word “know” seems to spasm like a fish out of water.
I’ve recently begun a new tack … now I’m writing about the agent of my twenty-four hour-a-day anxiety. Listen closely … he’s like a madman on the loose. His footsteps approach with each creak of of the floorboards above. I can hear his bell. He murmurs, “Sally’s forgotten you …”
She lay in the sand with her scuba mask, snorkel, spear and flippers and I built, like the bowerbird, a chamber in which to woo her. To woo her hence. To woo her from the gloss of the page. I looked at the clock-radio, at the photograph of Sally upon the night-table and again at the photograph in the magazine. My laziness annoyed me—there were three matters which required my immediate attention: the unraveling of a blunderheaded confusion regarding my bank account, the acquisition of a New York Times and the purchase of Donald Henderson Clarke’s newest volume entitled
Confidential
. I was especially anxious to see the size of the headline announcing the Kaiser’s break with the Prussian Parliament. I called two of my students and told them to get right over with the new palanquin and take me to the bank, first of all!