Girl With Curious Hair

SAY NEVER

LABOV

A THING that is no fun? Stomach trouble. You don't believe me, you ask Mrs. Tagus here, she'll illuminate issues. Me: no stomach trouble. A stomach of hardy elements, such as stone. Arthritis yes, stomach trouble no.

The tea is not helping Mrs. Tagus's stomach trouble. "Such discomfort Mr. Labov!" she says to me in my kitchen of my apartment, where we are. "Excuse me for the constant complaining," she says, "but it seems that to me anything that is the least little worry these days means the automatic making of my stomach into a fist!" She makes with a fist in the air, in her coat, and bends to blow on the very hot tea, which is steaming with violence into the cold air of my kitchen. "And now such worry," Mrs. Tagus says. She is making an example of a fist in the air in a firm manner I envy, because of the arthritis I have in my limbs every day, especially in these winters; but I only express sympathy to the stomach of Mrs. Tagus, who has been my best and closest friend since my late wife and then her late husband passed away inside three months of each other seven years ago may they rest in peace.

I am a tailor. Labov the North-side tailor who can make anything. Now retired. I chose, cut, fit, stitched and tailored the raccoon coat Mrs. Tagus has been wearing for years now and is inside of now in my kitchen which my landlord keeps cold, like the rest of this apartment, which my late wife Sandra Labov and I first rented in the years of President Truman. The landlord wants Labov out so he can raise rent to a younger person. But he should know who should know better than a tailor how it's no trouble to wear finely stitched coats and wait for spring. An ability to wait has always been one of my abilities.

I made the heavy raincoat with lining of various fur Mrs. Tagus's late husband and my close friend Arnold Tagus was interred in eight years ago this August.

"Lenny," Mrs. Tagus has murmured to her tea. There is no more fist in the air; she is warming her hands on the emergency cup of tea. "Lenny," she says, distracted from me by the warmth she holds in her dry hands.

Lenny is Mr. and Mrs. Tagus's son, Lenny Tagus. Also there is a younger son, Mike Tagus. Me: no children. Mrs. Labov had reproduction troubles which I loved her no less when we found out. But no children. But Labovs and all the Taguses are like this. Close. I watched the Tagus boys grow up, Lenny and Mike, prides and joys.

You know the type who comes right out with it? Mrs. Tagus is not such a type of person. Something is on her mind: she beats around it, a gesture here, a word there, a sigh maybe; she shapes it inside her like with a soft medium, for instance clay, and you have to patiently work the medium with her to get the something out in the open.

Me: I come right out with it, when there's something.

MIKEY AND LOUIS

"You want to still date her?"

"Are you fucking kidding? I want to strangle her."

"Uh-huh."

"I'd love to still date her."

"Just stay away. She seems like bad news. She seemed like she was really into it."

"She blew me off. I didn't blow her off."

"How, exactly?"

"Carlina blew me off."

"So how, Tagus?"

"She just said how she didn't want to go out no more. It didn't feel so good, either. I can maybe see why they cry, when you blow them off."

"She said that? Just like that?"

"Just like after I'd rammed about half a gram up her nose and bought her drinks all night."

"Bad news."

"I must of rammed about a gram up her nose."

"I bet you didn't have to ram anything up anything. I bet her nose didn't need much persuading."

"It started out nice. It was her and Lenny, who I want her to hit it off with, and me. Her and him do my whole gram while I'm over at the bar getting us drinks. Then he takes off to like tuck his kids into bed. He's dribbling the shit out his nose, he's bouncing off walls, and he's going to tuck in his kids. And then me and her have an argument about it. I don't even remember what about. And then later she just blows me off."

"Want a beer?"

"She just left me sitting there. I don't even know how she got back home."

"…"

"I think I feel like killing her."

"Not worth it. Have a beer."

"Two months, man. That's two months down the tube. I had her meet everybody. Mom, Labov. I told her personal shit. Shit about who I was."

"Bad news."

"You bet your sweet ass bad news, Lou."

" 'Does Lenny have to say about it? You talk this out with Lenny?"

"He'd condescend. He's a pecker in situations like this. He talks down to me. Big brother little brother. And plus he's out like all day. Bonnie says she don't even know where, office, bar, where.

She's half crying herself the whole time. Her and Len got their own problems. They're both like this about something. Shaky. Pissed off. Lenny was on the drinks and the toot like a last meal. I go to the bar to get them drinks, they just do it without me. Who's gonna figure on that?"

"Nobody, man."

"And then I bought her drinks all night."

"Open the beer."

"I think I might kill her."

"Nobody's killing anybody, Mikey."

"Try to think of somebody for me to hit, at least."

LEN

Cinnamon girl, spiced cream, honey to kiss, melt hot around the center of me.

LABOV

"Lenny is your pride and joy," I say to Mrs. Tagus. I say: "What could be with Lenny that makes for stomach trouble for a proud and joyful mother such as you Mrs. Tagus?"

"If you had gotten a letter and then a call on the telephone like I got today Mr. Labov, even your perfect stomach would make for itself a knot, a fist. And for me, with stomach trouble. ." She shakes her head in her well-made coat.

I press Mrs. Tagus to eat a saltine.

"Lenny trouble," she murmurs, beating around the something. While a saltine is being carefully chewed she murmurs also: "Bonnie."

So I can gather there are troubles between Lenny Tagus, Mrs. Tagus's son, a teacher, in college, who wrote a book about Germans before Hitler (in a print so tiny who could read it?) that got called Solid and Scholarly in a Review Mrs. Tagus has taped onto her refrigerator with the kind of invisible tape you don't get off in a hurry. There is trouble between Mrs. Tagus's Lenny and Lenny Tagus's Bonnie, his wife of eight, nine years, a sweeter and better girl than even as perfect a catch as Len could hope for, who has borne him healthy and polite children, and who makes a knish so good it is spelled s-i-n.

Mrs. Tagus is whispering unhearable things, sipping her tea which is now cooler and has stopped its steaming violently into the cold air of my apartment's kitchen.

"So how do letters and telephones and your children I love like my own make for such stomach trouble?" I say. I place four stacked crackers next to Mrs. Tagus's saucer.

"If you had gotten the call I got from Bonnie," Mrs. Tagus says. "From this girl who who would want to hurt her? Who who would want to not give her feelings weight on the scale?"

I can see the whiteness of my breath a little in the kitchen air. I find a reassurance in how I can see it. I put my hand on Mrs. Tagus's fist of a hand on my cold kitchen table. The skin of the knuckles of Mrs. Tagus is drawn tight and dry, and when she unfists the fist to let me comfort the hand I feel the skin crinkle like paper. Me: unfortunately also skin like paper. I look at our two hands. If my late Sandra were here with us this night I would say, to her only, things concerning oldness, coldness, trouble with stairs, paper-dry skin with brown sprinkles and yellowed nails, how it seems to Labov we get old like animals. We get claws, the shape of our face is the shape of our skull, our lips retreat back from big teeth like we're baring to snarl. Sharp, snarling, old: who should wonder at how nobody cares if I hurt, except another snarler?

Sandra Labov: the type everybody could say things to concerning issues like this. I miss her with everything. The loss of Sandra Labov is what makes my kitchen's clock's black hands go around, telling me when to do what.

Me and Mrs. Tagus have gotten close, like if you'll excuse me I think old people need to in this city these days. Her husband and me were like this, we were so close. For Mr. Tagus and the Taguses: tailored clothes at discounts. For me and Mrs. Labov: insurance at cost. Taguses and Labovs are close. So close I all of a sudden look at my clock and press Mrs. Tagus to tell me the cause of her stomach trouble straight out.

"Lay it on the line, Mrs. Tagus," I say.

She sighs and feels at herself in the cold. I watch her breath. She leans close and lays it on the line, whispering to me the words: "Infidelity, Mr. Labov." She looks with her cloudy eyes from op-erated-on cataracts behind her thick spectacles into my eyes and says, with a cleared throat: "Betrayal, also."

I let silence collect around this thing that's finally out in the open's hard medium and then ask Mrs. Tagus to clear me up on what's all this about betrayal.

"He's going to kill Bonnie by making her die of the pain of the shame of it. Or Mikey could justly raise hands against him, his own blood," is what Mrs. Tagus says she is having the awful stomach trouble over tonight, this some sort of triangular problem between the three children that I still don't feel like I'm cleared up on.

Mrs. Tagus fights against some tears. Her tea has gotten cold and lighter in color than tea, and I get up to my feet for the can of tea and the hot water in the copper kettle my wife Sandra and I received from Arnold and Greta Tagus on the day of our wedding when Roosevelt passed away may he rest, and Mrs. Tagus clears her throat some more and feels at her stomach through her coat I stitched together, using fine gut thread to weld the pelts.

She says the call on the phone from her daughter-under-law Bonnie Tagus today that has her in her condition had also to do with half a Xeroxed letter from Lenny, her son and pride, a half a letter which Mrs. Tagus received in her postal box, also today, but before the call on the phone from Bonnie Tagus. It all comes in a rush. The half a letter from Lenny she says was a Xerox (not even personal?). He had mailed several Xerox copies of the letter, by Express Mail. A rush job. " 'An outpouring' he says," Mrs. Tagus says, " 'to all friends and family.' " Illuminating all issues for everybody. She looks at me at the kettle on the stove which only one big burner still has gas. Did I, Mr. Labov, also get such a first half of a letter? But I get my mail once a week only, on Tuesday (today is almost Friday, by the clock), on account of my box here at my building has been broken into, and I feel it is insecure, and my check for Social Security from the government comes by mail, so I have a secure box I got at the Post Office but the Post Office is half an hour by El or seven dollars by taxicab and let's not even discuss bus routes and in this weather who needs the more than once a week bother? So it could be in my box. Mrs. Tagus has confidence in the security of her postal box here in the building, which she and Arnold Tagus first moved in starting with the weekend they electrocuted the Rosenbergs because of Nixon.

I put some more hot and dark freshened tea before Mrs. Tagus, in a specially gotten mug, from the Mug House in Marshall Fields, with a lid on it, to keep the heat in the tea, which I got with emergencies like this one maybe in the back of my mind. The night years ago when Mikey Tagus swallowed his tongue in high school football, cup after cup Arnold and Greta drank out of some emergency mugs, with lids, that I'd brought, at the Emergency Room. We all sat close with tea and prayed with worry. That night was the first time Mrs. Tagus's stomach made like a fist. And she is making with the fist with her hand in the air again, and in the fist are crinkled paper pages, from a letter, smeared like Xeroxes get when wet, from Lenny. She rocks in my kitchen chair and looks across the alley at the fire escape which is the view, speaking.

LEN'S HALF AN OPEN LETTER SENT TO "THAT COMMUNITY OF MY FAMILY AND INTIMATE FRIENDS — LETTER APPROPRIATELY CONCEIVED ALSO AS AN INFORMATIONAL SATELLITE, A PROBE LAUNCHED INTO THE EMOTIONAL CONSTELLATION SURROUNDING AND INFORMING THIS CORRESPONDENT'S PERSONAL ORBIT — EXCLUDING THE PARTIES BONNIE FLUTTERMAN TAGUS AND MICHAEL

ARNOLD TAGUS — REGARDING THIS CORRESPONDENT AND THE ABOVE TWO EXCLUDED PARTIES"

21-2

Beloved fathers and teachers, Please know that the party Leonard Shlomith Tagus, Gent., Ph.D., author of Motion in Poetry: The Theme of Momentum in Weimar Republic Verse, a monograph from which royalties in excess of three figures are forecast to accrue in fiscal 1985, Northwestern University's lone blade-burnished Teutonist, student, teacher, son, father, brother; that wiliest of connubial mariners, that L. S. Tagus, having for nine years navigated successfully between the Scylla and Charybdis of Inclination and Opportunity, has, as of today, 21 February 1985, committed adultery, on four occasions, with one Carlìna Rentaria-Cruz, former significant other of my brother, Michael Arnold Tagus; that the party anticipates further episodes of such adultery; and that such past and highly probable future episodes will be brought to the attention of the party's wife, Ms. Bonnie Flutterman Tagus, between 1:00 and 2:00 pm (lunch) this date.

Know further that it is neither the desire & intention of L. Tagus, nor the project of an openly probing letter, either: (a) to excuse those libidinal/genital activities on the part of this party likely to excite disfavor or — ease within his intimate constellation; or: (b) to explain same, since the explanation of any transgression inevitably metastasizes into excuse (see (a)); but rather merely: (c) to inform those parties on whom my existence and the behavior that defines same can be expected to have an effect of the events outlined above and discussed, as usual, below; and: (d) to describe, probably via the time-tested heuristic pentad, the W's of why those events have taken and do and will take place; and: (e) to project the foreseeable consequences of such activities for this correspondent, for those other parties (B.F.T., M.A.T.) directly affected by his choices, and for those other other parties whose psychic fortunes are, to whatever extent, bound up with our own.

(a) and (b) conceded, then, and (c) killed in the telling:

Cinnamon girl. Full-lipped, candy-skinned, brandy-haired South-American-type girl. A type: a girl the color of dirty light, eyes a well-boiled white and hair like liquor, scintillant and smoky; precisely pointed breasts that shimmy when her chest caves in, when her chest caves in and hand flutters worried about the breastbone, from the laughter. Which is constant. This is a merry girl. Laughs at any stimuli not macabre or political, avoid abortion controversy; but otherwise a weather without change, a thing that carries her from place to place rather than obversely, a laugh of the piercing sort that resembles a possessed state, helpless, crumpled in around her perception of anomaly or embarrassment, harmless harm to anyone in a world that is only a violent cartoon, wet eyes darting around for assistance, some invitation to gravity, the detu-mescence of a nipple scraped in shimmy by cotton, some distraction to let her decontort. A merriment that is almost on the edge of pain.

And I watched her crumple, eyes the color of cream squeezed tight, over a tall and sonorous Graphix water-pipe, at the apartment of Mikey Tagus; and a wax-deaf man in a city of sirens heard one siren's fatal call; and the malignant, long-slalomed rocks mated with a crunch through the dry eggshell prow of my careful character. Carlina Rentaria-Cruz, secretarial aide at North Side offices of Chicago Park District. Twenty, lovely, light and dark, hair sticky with gin, our lady of wet rings on album covers, Spanish lilt, pointed boots, a dairy sheen to redly white skin, lips that gleam, shine a light — shine without aid of tongue — they manufacture their own moisture.

Contrast — please, neither offense nor explanation intended — contrast a wide-bottomed, solid, pale-as-all-indoors woman of thirty-four. Known in milliscopic detail. Large squash-shaped mole on left arm sports a banner of black hair. Nipples like pencil erasers, hard and corrective against wide shallow breasts whose broad curves I know like the Lake's own tired sweep. A woman ever armed with hemorrhoid pillow in one of only two stages of inflation, an obscene pink doughnut of hardened plastic, cushioning with her own dioxides the woman's legacy from the long and labored birth of Saul Tagus. A woman whose lips are chronically dry (bad sebum flow) and collect a white paste at the corners. Whose posture, I confess, has always been a little too good for my complete peace of mind. And whose quiet static laughter is always appropriate, conscious, complicated by an automatic and sophisticated concern for the special sensitivities of everyone present.

Viz. Bonnie laughs only with; Carlina was so conceived and constituted as to laugh only at.

E.g. Representative Laughter-Scenario: B. F. Tagus: Envision dinner party — B. F. Tagus filling her self-imposed quota of one family anecdote that will 'tickle' our guests: "And Joshua gets his piece of pie from the waiter, and his eyes are getting bigger and bigger' (uncanny imitation here) 'he looks at it, and he says to me, he whispers when the waiter's left he says Momma, why Momma there's ice cream on this pie, and I say but Joshua, the waiter asked you if you wanted your pie a la mode honey and you said yes; and Joshua looks at me he's about to cry almost the poor love and he says A la mode? Momma I thought he said pie all alone. Is… what… he… thought… he…" (hand to mouth, eyes frighteningly wide, unaffected, shoulders moving up and down in sync, laughter full of love, good will, etc.).

Vs. Representative Laughter-Scenario: C. R-Cruz: 'Len, Len, what is different between beer nuts and deer nuts. I hear this in a club on the Loop' (The Loooop.) 'Beer nuts are fifty cents and yet deer nuts are just under a… buck!' (Becoming here crumpled, other, helpless in the grip of the nasty (grip of the nasty).)

Not to mention an utterly deadly accent, a fellation of each syllable through the auto-lubricated portal that is at once a deep garden and a tall jagged city. A planet.

'OH LENITO I WILL EEET YOU!'

(Congress, by the way, has revealed itself here to be a loud and exquisitely goy affair — cries from Carlina and accessory of a desperation only partly channeled; mad twined scrabble of a search for something key hidden at a system of bodies' center.)

And so ungodly precise about it all:

'Len, Len, how many of the girls known as Jewish American Princesses are needed for the screwing in of a light bulb?'

'Princesses?'

'Answer is two of them I heard. One to call a Daddy and one to buy the Tab!' contorting into wherever she sits. (Wicked. There is a wickedness in the corners here, and it is good, see below, (though I must say I found that particular joke offensive.))

Further,

MIKEY AND LOUIS

"So what's the point of even calling him, then?"

"Advice, Tagus. He's older. He's been around. He's been there. He can put the thing in some perspective for you."

"He's a pecker in situations like Carlina and me, is the thing. He talks down to me when I let him know I want advice."

"He saw how you were treating her good and how she was acting like it was going to last."

"It wasn't like I wanted it to last forever or anything."

"Len's a smart guy, Mikey."

"It's just if I'm going to stop sleeping with somebody I want it to be my decision to stop it, is all. Or to at least talk about it first."

"He'll understand, probably. You said he met her. He'll tell you to not sweat it."

"I really think I'd rather hit somebody."

"Tagus."

"Line's busy anyway."

"Have a beer. At least it means they're home." "Maybe I should just go ahead and call Carlina." "I wouldn't." "I'm predicting right now he'll be a pecker about it."

LEN

I have told the cinnamon girl how I will never be forgiven for this. Never. How by the time you reach a certain history and situation you're bound up with people, part of a larger thing. How the whole constellation becomes as liquid, and any agitation ripples. She asked me who it was who first said never say never. I told her it must have been someone alone.

She is silk in a bed of mail-order satin. Complete and seamless, an egg of sexual muscle. My motions atop her are dislocated, frantic, my lone interstice a trans-cultural spice of encouragement I smell with my spine. As, inside it, I go, I cry out to a god whose absence I have never felt so keenly.

She wears Catholic medals, a jingle all their own. I have apologized for invoking god's name at such a moment. She touches my hip. There are no atheists in foxy holes. She laughs into my chest; I feel her eyes' squeeze.

She is wrong for me.

LABOV

I have arranged Mrs. Tagus's chair so that she is able to use my wall-telephone on the wall of my kitchen to talk to Lenny, her son, without having to stand — which in her conditions, at a time like this, with family and stomach trouble, standing would not be good. She is on the phone with Lenny. There is much bravery here as Mrs. Tagus listens without crying to things Lenny is saying on the wall-telephone. My heart is going out. I love Mrs. Tagus like a man friend loves a woman friend. She is my last true and old friend in this world except for old Schoenweiss the dentist who is too deaf now to converse about weather with even. As I drink my own tea and I look at Mrs. Tagus in her fine and well made coat and fine old wool dress with some small section of slip showing over heavy dark stockings and then the soft white shoes with the thick rubber soles, for her arches, which fell, her thick eyeglasses for her eyes and still mostly dark hair in color under a beaver hat which it breaks my heart to be remembering her late Arnold Tagus wearing just that hat to Bears football games with me, in the cold of old autumns, I know, inside, I love Mrs. Tagus, who I called Greta to her face while I helped her to the chair I arranged under the wall-telephone and strongly urged her, as a friend I said, to make for the sake of her stomach the telephone call that could maybe clear up some of the total misunderstanding. I am a dry and yellow snarling animal who loves another animal.

There is by my wall-telephone a large and wide section of flowered wallpaper, from the wall of my kitchen, which has been peeling since Jimmy Carter (try talking to my landlord about anything), and it is curving over Mrs. Tagus's hat and head like a wave of cornflower-blue water, with flowers. I do not like the way it appears to curve over Greta Tagus.

Anger from me at her Lenny, however? This I could not manage even if I could understand quite this trouble which keeps Mrs. Tagus crumpled over her stomach under my telephone. Lenny Tagus is a nice boy. This is a thing I know. I know the Lenny Tagus who put himself through a college, with a doctorate even, and all the time was helping the finances of Arnold and Greta Tagus when Arnold Tagus's office got bought by State Farm and he got put on commission only, which if you ask anybody is what killed him. The Lenny who would have helped also put Mikey through a college if Mike had not received the scholarship in college football to the Illini of the University of Illinois, but dropped out when it was revealed how he had never learned enough about reading, and went instead to work for the Softball Department of the Chicago Park District, where he is doing a fine and solid job, although anybody could see how winters would be slow, in terms of softball business.

The Lenny Tagus who calls his mother, Mrs. Tagus, twice a week, like my clock, "just to talk," is the excuse, except really to always let his mother know how she's loved by him and not forgotten alone in her and Arnold's quite old cold apartment. Not to mention how Mrs. Tagus, often myself in addition, gets invited into Lenny's home and family for such a dinner cooked by Bonnie Tagus! Once a month or more. Josh Tagus and Saul Tagus and little Becky Tagus in pajamas with pajama-feet attached, yawning over milk in plastic mugs with cartoons on their sides. Lenny smoothing their fine thin child's hair and reading to them from Gibran or Novalis under a soft lamp. You know from warmth? There is warmth in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Tagus.

"So I should meet this person?" Mrs. Tagus is questioning under the wave of wallpaper into my phone. "Us and Mike and Bonnie and this person should just sit down and talk like old friends?" She broaches to Lenny the possibility that his mind is maybe temporarily out of order, maybe from stress and tension from middle age. She respectfully mentions just so he'll know that she can hear Becky, and also it sounds like Bonnie, crying in Lenny's telephone's background. She expresses disbelieving shock, plus all-new and severe stomach trouble, at Lenny's revealing that a certain girl who was not Bonnie was right there, he said, now, in his and Bonnie's master bedroom, under a sheet, with Lenny, and that Bonnie: when Lenny last saw her she was in the spray-cleaner closet of the utility room, crying.

The Len Tagus with a crewcut and Bermuda shorts with black socks who mowed the building's lawns when the super was under the weather from gin, to save the Tagus family a little rent. Who I remember refused to let Mike (Mike is four years younger but at ten even he already had inches and pounds over Lenny, over everybody — Mike may be five years younger, it's four or five) who would not let Mike fight a fight on his behalf when wicked boys broke Lenny's French horn and kicked him in the back with shoes as he lay on the ground of the schoolyard and left yellow bruises I can still with my eyes closed see on the back of young Lenny Tagus, who wouldn't let Mikey know who to fight.

The Lenny who did my wife Mrs. Labov's shopping for months when God knows he had work of his own and plenty of it to do in school for his degree and doctorate, when Mrs. Labov's phlebitis got extreme and I had to be at the shop tailoring and the elevator in the building was broken and the landlord, even during Kennedy and Johnson he was trying to get us out, he took criminal time in getting to repairs, and Sandra would give Len a list.

Mrs. Tagus is telling Lenny on the phone to just hold it right there. That she has things to tell him, as a mother. There is the fortitude of the person who carries around stomach trouble every day in her voice's tone. The cold of my kitchen makes for a pain in my hands and I put them under my arms, under my lined coat, like Arnold Tagus's old coat, that I made.

LENNY

As I spoke and listened to my mother, envisioning her hand at either her stomach or her eyes, the two physical loci of any of the troubles she gathers to her person and holds like shiny prizes, Mr. Labov doubtless at his black teapot, baggy old pants accumulating at his ankles and sagging to reveal the northern climes of his bottom (god I feel pathos for people whose pants sag to reveal parts of their bottom), envisioning him clucking and casting, from a cloak of tea steam, glances at my mother, at the phone, my mother no doubt leaning for support against the lurid peeling wall of Labov's prehistoric kitchen; and as I reviewed the letter, undoubtedly couched somewhere on the person of my mother, the letter a doomed exercise in disinformation I could not even finish before sending it from me, rabid with a desire that things be somehow just known, that it be out, the waiting over and trauma-starter's gun's sharp crack — [keep]

— I found myself raw and palsied with the urge, in mid-conversation — the conversation consisted as usual chiefly of pauses, the wire's special communication of the sound of distance, electric and lonely — the urge… to explain. To explain. And as I urged my mother to come to my home, to help the edible girl and me extract Bonnie from a darkness of brooms rags and Lysol, and to hash this all out, we five, together — I found rising in my hickied throat the gorged temptation to explain, excuse, exhypothesize, extinguish in and for myself the truth, the flat unattractive and uninteresting truth that came concrete for me via nothing other than a small and shakily faint line written in quick pencil over the southernmost urinal in the men's room of my office's floor at University, the line simply[keep]

no more mr. nice guy[keep]

amid the crude tangle of genitalia that surrounded its eye-level run. .

Instead, in electromagnetic communication with my flesh, amid the sounds of Becky and Bonnie and the burble and chuckle of Carlina's bare coffee back bent before a bong hidden somewhere on the femininely held side of the Tagus bed; on the phone, instead, I found roiling out of me a torrent of misdirections, like releases of bureaucratic flatus, calculations derived from an ageless child's axioms about what his mother wishes to hear, arguments twirling off the base clause that Bonnie and I Are Just Not Right For Each Other Any More Mom, that We've Grown Apart, with Nothing But The Kids To Hold Us Together, and Is That Fair To Of All People The Kids?

Which mr. nice guy knows is manipulative, empty, and testa-mentally wicked.

Though there was an episode, too unbeveled to have been a dream, in which one wee-houred morning, last last year, Bonnie and I both half-awoke. In sync. In this bed. Half-awoke, sat up, and looked at each other's thick outlines in the green glow of the alarm's digital spears; we looked at each other, first with recognition, then a synchronized shock: looked shocked at these each others and shouted, in unison, WHAT?' and fell on our pillows and back to a puffy sleep. Compared notes at breakfast and both came away shaken.

This Mom understands, this sort of unified moment's revelation of separateness; it's marriage trouble as opposed to person trouble, troughs in the ebbing and flowing sinal flux that attends all long-term life-term emotional intercourse. She says,

'Every marriage gets its ups and its downs, or else it's not a marriage. You I need to tell about the years me and your late father?'

Yes Mom.

But, see, also no.

I could respond honestly with the kind of interior paralysis that also attends any sustained intersection of two people's everyday stuffed-together practical concerns, and how this restricts the breath of a man. The way Bonnie's conversation condenses each and every evening around issues. The cost of re-covering the love seats in the family room. The quality of market x's cut of meat y. The persistent and mysterious psoriatic rash on Josh's penis that is causing him to scratch in a way that simply cannot go on.

Vs. this partner, who is in best and worst ways still a child: either sulking, overcome, silent, screaming Yes {Si! Yes! [God!]); or offering on her Sears sofa, to a tie-loosened teacher pummeled into catatonia by the day's round with the near-Soviet bureaucracy that is this university's German Department, offering to me a cool twittered river of such irrelevant and so priceless insights as 'I hate my hair today; I hate it' (how can one hate one's hair?); or 'I notice on the television last night that the nose of Karl Maiden resemble the scrotum of a man, no?' (Yes); or 'Fahck you man is not funny I get my period in my god damn pair of white jeans at the right there checkout line at Jewel'; or 'Will Mike beat you when he finds out' (were it only that simple); or 'I never love anybody ever'; 'You want me to feel sorry for your wife who you don't love anymore' (were it only).

Yes Mrs. Tagus weary of navigation, exigency, routineschmerz, mid-life angst rendered. A unit of cinnamon milk, on fire with love for no one ever, vs. exhaustively tested loyalty, hard-headed realism, compassion, momentum, a woman the color and odor of Noxzema for all time.

Vs. vs. vs.: the reasons that center on others are easy to manipulate. All hollow things are light.

Because I just tire of being well. Of being good. Maybe I'm just tired of not knowing where in me the millenial expectations of a constellation leave off, where my own will hangs its beaver hat. I wish a little well-hung corner. I wish to be willful. I will it. It is not one bit more complicated than no more mr. n. g.

That's no more mr. l. s.

Then no more bullshit, if I can send even myself only halves.

If only Bonnie'd stop scratching at the closet door.

LABOV

"A good boy Lenny," Mrs. Tagus says truthfully to my phone. "You're a good man, and we love you, Bonnie and Mikey and I. Even Mr. Labov," she looks my way and the bravery which has held on so long in Mrs. Tagus's case gives up, and Mrs. Tagus weeps, weeping like you can imagine whole nations weeping, and I turn away, for respect. I put my aching hands with arthritis under my arms in my coat and look across the fire escape across the courtyard of my building at the window my window faces, which has a shade down which has never recently come up. The shade has been down since the Viet Nam era and I do not know who lives in the apartment. I notice how there's no more talking and Mrs. Tagus behind me has hung the wall-telephone up on the wall by the piece of wallpaper that curves. She is weeping like a nation, her eyes squeezed tightly from the pain of such stomach trouble I don't even want to imagine. I go to Mrs. Tagus.

MIKEY AND LOUIS

"Mikey, all I said is where, is all I said."

"If I get grabbed and I have to go somewhere in such a hurry I like to know where I'm goin', is all."

"You won't say where you're going, you can at least tell me why that brake light on the dash stays on all the time like that."

'The brake light?"

"In the dash here. Long as I can remember that thing never goes off. You got brake trouble, I can give you some names of places."

"It's a thing in the dash's guts. It's the connection. It never goes out. Ever since I got it. It's kind of like an eternal flame to me by now."

"Never goes out?"

"And it ain't the brakes, either."

"That'd probably give me the creeps a little bit."

"I don't know. I think I like it. I think I think it's reassuring a little, somehow."

LEN

Though even the novice alone can see quickly that a life conducted, temporarily or no, as a simple renunciation of value becomes at best something occluded and at worst something empty: a life of waiting for the will-be-never. Sitting in passive acceptance of (not judgment on) the happening and ending of things.

I will wait for the arrival of those whose orbits I've decayed. I will wait through the publicness of the thing — the collective countenance, the conferring, recriminating, protestations of loyalty, betrayal, consequence. And then that too will end. The hurt will take the harmed away. My constellation will be outside my ken.

But they will wait, because I will wait. We will wait for the day when the puncture and cincture of Carlina Rentaria-Cruz becomes for Leonard Shíomith simply part of the day. And we will wait for that inevitable day when silent whistles sound and my one siren leaves me for a man the color of a fine cigar.

And do not say then that I will wait for something to wait for.

LABOV

"Go on out of here with yourselves and leave the lady alone!" I shout at a mobster gang of boys in leather who are taking up all the space of the plastic shelter of the El platform and who are whistling and making with comments at the tears which are frozen by the wind on the thick spectacles of Mrs. Tagus. I can feel in my cold feet on the platform (feet: arthritis also) the fact that the train is coming.

I tell Mrs. Tagus to call when she needs a late taxicab home. I will meet her at home.

A vagrant beside a burning ashcan for trash is singing the national anthem across both sets of the tracks, but the song comes to us and then goes in the strongly blowing winter wind on the platform. All the snow is frozen in rigid positions. I give to Mrs. Tagus the Thermos vacuum bottle of the tea for on the train, the ride takes three quarter-hours except for thank God no transfers.

I tell Mrs. Tagus to tell her boys to call my apartment. We'll drink something hot, talk the whole matter out.

So here comes the train. Mrs. Tagus feels her way. She never talks when she cries, Greta. We pretend how it's not happening, for dignity. She is inside the door of the train. She gets a seat alone, but facing away from where the train's going, which I'm worried is bad for stomachs. Greta takes her gloves from her hands and puts her yellowed hands, which I can remember when they were white, she puts her hands up to remove her frozen eyeglasses. Without her glasses Mrs. Tagus is older. The doors close themselves before I can walk with my stiffness to tell Mrs. Tagus through the opening to face where the train is going. There is so much noise I can't stand the noise. I have my hands in my gloves I bought over my ears and I see Mrs. Tagus pulled away north on a track. In our building in my kitchen I look at my kitchen and see the train pull her away.