Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty (3 page)

Constantine—one of the finest men I’ll ever know—walked in my direction like a duck who’s wrung himself out. My recommendation to the duck would have been—don’t fly alone and why fly so high. Do the other ducks know you’re out here on your own? Do you even know where the other fucks are? Are you looking for the other fucks?

Marg Foo had been flirtatious with me once. Now she sits in her Avenger as if it were an upright chair and tells me, “What could you do so that I would forgive you?”

So, now it’s show time. In the best of times we are nibbling. Fix your mind on the sweep of the action—on the swish, on the smash, and the bang.

Marg left, perhaps for the rest of her life.

Tim kept to himself. Gertrude married again.

I am going to pick up Mr. Reed in the basement.

Vera Quilt knows the princes she says. There was some big event—a horse with plumes, and soldiers with ruby buttons, shiny helmets, and swords—when she met them.

If there had been any doubt about my feelings for Vera, now there was not. I looked at her warmly.

The air was cold and I mention this because this is a miniature world with levels of experience where people may starve to death.

At some distance from us there was a mob of people—they’re wonderful people—and broad-leaved evergreens, and a flock of birds behaving normally.

“Hoo!—hoo!” Vera began again.

“Now, what do you want, Vera?” I said. Vera and I—we resolve everything in under an hour. She said, “I talked to my husband. It is too hard for me. I come home and it’s late and I am tired and he is tired.”

And, truly, it’s as if people put big branches out on the ground so that Vera can practice climbing on them. You should know that her mind bubbles up in her brain, showing movement, lift! It comes about this way—her confidence, all of it that goes to make a woman.

A large vein showing on her hand curves around her knuckle. She had a cuticle nippers in her hand. Her breath smelt of nothing. Her skull was quite large, but her coat and her skirt were short and there was, pinned to her lapel, a generously sized gemstone flower basket that most people are assuming is a gift from the crown.

“I’d rather not go any farther with you,” she said. “I am very tired.”

“Exactly,” I said.

However, Vera and I had resolved everything in order to push on. She’s the best living woman. It was six o’clock, end of the day, as we smoothed farther into the unknown, which is sometimes described as a plot of evil—cliffs and or swamps overshadowing one another, hideous plateaus, and phosphorescent glimmers. Vera protected, pocketed her nippers, and there are the conquests of happiness to be considered that must be produced in the future, and in a series.

At the level of the street, we looked through the plate glass of the department store, a department store erected on the foundation of a princely court.

Vera is young and she still has her woman’s flow and we take a glance at something to watch out for in Macy’s window that has bulk. This is no drop in the bucket. You must have heard of the expression—
the apple of my eye?
—And we know how to cry–
Help!

You’d have thought her burden was worthy of her, although she shouldn’t keep trying to prove she has common sense.

She’s Vicky Swanky. She addressed an envelope and wrote her name and address on it also. She is my ideal, my old friend.

The letters of her script are medium sized with slim loops. Her ovals are clear. There were nicely turned heads.

She is still going through a divorce and her children were running around there.

“I forgot to take a shower,” she said. “Do you want to take one with me?”

Since I didn’t want to do it, I said no, because I’d get confused, and this is too important.

To repeat—I met up with Vicky Swanky whom I hadn’t seen in years—who said, “Why don’t you come over? I’ve had systemic lupus erythematosus and when you get through that—”

In connection with sex, we lightened up a little then and we dumped some of it off the edge at a minimum. We could be put through a few strokes like everyone else amid the overall circulation of water.

Human bodies are just not good enough!—and in this way we represented two weak powers.

She has adult-sized fist-sized hands with smooth joints. She has smaller than normal hands. Her hands are not smaller than my hands.

I brought Lee over in the late afternoon, the dog. He has the disposition to avoid conflict, is good-natured, and sets a fine example.

It was getting busy concerning the basic meaning, the degree, and the quality. And by late afternoon, the snow was staying on the surface. No one knows that any better.

Cruelly, I’ve seen nothing in the book I am reading—about me. I need to see specifically my life with pointers in the book.

May I suddenly drop in on Vicky Swanky and ask for favors?

Years ago Vicky Swanky was a beauty.

Now, here, there were vases of blanket flowers, pancakes. I am so confused here.

She served us pancakes and syrup and coffee and milk and butter. Her breasts were flat. Her hips were flat. She looked older than her forty years and she plays with all of us.

She has a strange way of showing it. There was a skirmish. The plumber arrived and he said he’d have to remove everything from the nipple in the wall to the toilet. Vicky Swanky said, “Is it true? One would think perhaps you might. I thought so. You were right to tell me. I won’t enjoy it very much. Naturally enough I can find that out for myself,” she said.

Doubtless, early on, in the ultra-fine beginning of the day, others were spectators as I withdrew into Carnegie Nail and I showed the coarseness of my nature in a new sense, for I kept my hands forever forward until at Mrs. Oh’s behest, Dee took them.

As a courtesy, to some extent, Mrs. Oh kept her cell phone conversation brief and her voice low.

Mr. Oh sat unspeaking in an aimless, I mean, armless chair. He was less husky than I would have expected—composed, nonetheless, of curving segments. Then, as if by the flip of a lever, he fell from his chair.

Others jumped around.

Strangest of all, whoever enters Carnegie Nail is exempted from the bitterness of experience.

Oh, Mr. Oh found his way back up to good effect while Mimi supported the shop’s potted, toppled plant.

The damp day got me as I left, but I did not publicly condemn it.

At home Wanda appeared with our infant and the infant’s father—my husband—was seated in a chair that’s sufficient to defend itself.

My next step surely was clear, for life presents the flowers of life. We’d been viewing the infant as if it’d been wrenched off a tree branch or a weedy stem.

But the question is much more complex. A child needs to be cut down to its lowest point compatible with survival.

I have this violent reaction to Margot Alphonse.

“Perhaps you’ll get treated,” she had said, “and then you won’t have blood all over your hands.”

In any event, Margot cancelled her appearance in this story. She had loved me, possibly… bathed me in the bathroom. We slept with a window open—on a pretty courtyard—where you can still hear the people who often need to significantly yell on the avenue.

On the improvement of my understanding of her and overall, I feel the variety of emotions.

Her voice is heavy. I had intended to lift it, to hold it, so it wouldn’t feel as if it was pulling at my neck.

My ethical standards are high.

“What shall we do now?” Margot asked. “I am returning your property.”

“No. No, you don’t, Margot.”

She opened up her handbag and handed me my stonewalls, it felt like.

My friend said, “I fell in love with the neighbor.”

I said, “Your husband fell in love with the neighbor?”

My friend said, “No!” She said, “
I
fell in love with the neighbor!”

She was counting her fingers. She said she couldn’t get the neighbor’s penis to do anything.

As a matter of fact, I couldn’t get his penis to do anything either. It hung like a mop or it had a life of its own. How it came up in the first place, I don’t know. He couldn’t get my vagina—I wanted to say—to utter a word.

But since one should always make room for fun, we all ate food and we laughed.

The last time I saw my friend was when she was finishing her drink, gulping. Was it like the sound of the sea perhaps?—how the sea very slowly and with great effort laps but does not go down—I want to say—in one gulp.

The last time I saw my friend’s crêpe de chine skin, her frizzy hair—her dark breasts that wriggle raw, I said to myself, “You had enough?”

He had just seen a rodent with such expressive eyes and he knows horses intimately, too. He carves horses and he paints a whole group on their points of hips, the throatlatches, on the tails, and so forth.

His daughter and his daughter’s friend have stopped by briefly.

If left to themselves, they fight like fiends or yell out the great news and one of these girls is entirely out of danger.

The daughter hates her father and she says, “Dad, sorry, but you should keep trying me—”

He knows a horse seems to be laboring when its legs are drawn up under it—he knows that.

His daughter has a terrified pair of eyes.

A Delta Airlines employee arrives to deliver his lost piece of luggage.

The father blushes—congratulates himself for getting so much attention, is so stimulated, and ever since has felt irremediably shy when sexual subjects are discussed.

So, I’ve got good news, but I also felt so bad I was crying.

She’s so wrongly old and I’m her daughter, but can she still have children?

Now I have a baby boy and a five-year-old girl.

Being married, I thought I’d always be married to Wayne because he tried to be perfect. What more could he ask for?

They don’t need to get me more belts. I have enough belts. I like the fringe.

This is to commemorate personal tastes—mine—the Durrants’. The Durrants are still here.

Mrs. Durrant asks Gabor Mavor what she wants and Gabor says, “A watch.”

I wish I had Gabor’s health and safety.

However, I am encouraged by the spirit of invention. A man I see through the plate glass shovels a lot of snow and he doesn’t even have a shovel! He has one of those little brush scrapers on a stick.

A man like this has self-confidence.

Often life deals severely with me, and yet I’ll be wearing my nose.

There’s a cloth to wipe clear her muscular organ with the foam or the scum on it. People were talking too loudly. “You can’t tell grown up people what to do,” someone said. One person had fever, pain in the abdomen that develops normally like a sixth sense, and he wasn’t careful choosing a marriage partner. He is noted for his humor and his favorite color is dark purple.

The physician covering him called him to report: “I find myself shocked and deeply hurt by your condition.”

Her fate was being rigged for the rough surface. Nothing was omitted from her desirable world insofar as she likes Mr. Keable and other men in suits with short hair; patient service staff who smile; all the people with large, accurate vocabularies; big blossoms; logical arguments.

If a poached egg, open and bleeding, could give us the color palette, let us color her home in with that.

In the evening, Mrs. Keable’s brothers, arriving in a black Volkswagen, often visited. She had in the past been scared to death of them.

As the sun comes up, it’s as if, for Mrs. Keable, there’s a slice of lime on any serving of her food.

See how the kitchen spray looks when it’s turned into words?—white or buff and gray.

The daughter leant over a hope chest to confirm the location of the electrical outlet.

It doesn’t make my life worse to say that the mother seems to enjoy herself and that the daughter is fine. The previous autumn there’d been difficulties. The daughter fled and did not plan to return. The grave of the woman’s husband had been recently dug.

The daughter’s dead now.

The mother poured herself a cup of coffee and studied the meniscus and I sized it up, too.

I tried to see how I could run off into my own words.

Don’t hurt me!

I’m smart, I think, and I am always up for fun and games—jokes. So this is suitable for certain people. One day the police found me in a pile of snow and I said I don’t want to live anymore. Mother gave me a hot drink, a bath, washed my clothes, and ironed them. We had a long talk—she saved my life. I was going to find another snowdrift.

This morning I walked toward a tree. A woman at a distance was standing in the snow, crying, “Melba! Melba!” That’s what I thought.

“Do you want me to get her for you?” I called. I called again and I called again to the woman just to make sure.

“What would I have done?” she said. “I would have had to go way over there and around, but I just can’t!”

“Don’t let go of her leash!” I said, and turned away.

After a pause, I looked into the world, but I never found them.

The Almighty doesn’t spoil everything—for I saw sky-high things—a tan bag, paper. I woke up dizzy. Mrs. Billyboy said the room was going around. Took her to the doctor. She got examined and is OK now.