I Smell Esther Williams

PANGS IN THE P.M

“My son’s name was Diablito Leyner. Diablito—‘little devil.’ At three years of age he was five-seven, had body hair, a deep voice, read books, danced when you took him to Isadora’s, used stick deodorant, had sex with people’s housemates, had a receding hairline, drank too much now and then, and worried about things constantly. In fact, he was almost identically like myself. He was conceived on a spring night in a first floor alcove of the geology building where I’d found a janitress stooped in front of a display case of quartz specimens, completely transfixed with an annular sample of lapis lazuli. I tip-toed in back of her, lifted her skirt up, and we mated. So, one day I was defrosting my freezer. I’d put two or three bags of frozen vegetables in the back of the toilet tank to keep them cool. Diablito approached me from behind with a copy of Paradise Lost and read a passage: ‘O foul descent! that I who erst contended / With Gods to sit the highest, am now constrain’d / Into a Beast, and mixt with bestial slime …’ I stopped hacking away at the ice and told him it was time he hit the road and find out where he was at. ‘Take a bag of peas,’ I said, ‘and remember — eat where the truckdrivers stop, the food’s bound to be good.’ That was the last I ever saw of him. He’s changed his name to Richard Finestein. And he’s failed in half a dozen business ventures. The stock market, real estate, retail clothing, insurance, you name it. People say ‘Richard Finestein — he’s got a magic wand up his ass — everything he touches turns to shit.’ Well, I’m not the kind of guy who blubbers over spilled milk, if you know what I mean — but for weeks I’d just sit in that dilapidated Boston rocker and sweat buckshot and dumdum bullets and every night at the same time, a bus passed under my window followed, three minutes later, by a harried little man running with an overnight bag. Every night. You could time an egg by it. He’d run a few blocks and then stop, take a deep breath, turn around and walk back. One night I couldn’t contain myself — I flew downstairs just in time to collar the guy as he rushed by. ‘You again!’ he raged, ‘Every night you make me miss my bus!’ And he broke my grasp and ran, as was wonted, a few blocks, stopped, took a deep breath, turned around and walked back. As he approached me, he tipped his hat and bowed, ‘Excuse my behavior before,’ he said, ‘but I was in a terrible rush,’ and walked away … and I’m left standing there and I’m thinking — I’m like the guy who’s rummaged through a ton of glazed popcorn for something to hock and comes up with nothing but a sticky hand — and I’m thinking — what the fuck am I doing — I’m an asshole … and I was drinking so much V-8 juice that I always had diarrhea and I couldn’t find a razor I liked — the twin blades would get jammed up with hair and the little disposable single blades would cut me to ribbons …”

“Mark … Mark … Mark,” Barbara said, “like, what’s really bothering you?”

That department store signal was in my head — Ping Ping Ping Ping.

“Aaaaaaaw Barbara … I may have killed two or three Tai Chi students with that Datsun of mine.”

“You could use some more tea. Say when.” she said, bending at the waist and pouring more hot water into the cup that shook in my trembling hand. Her breasts fell forward against the printed calico of her blouse. But even this movement seemed alien and incidental as did the movement of the drapes that seemed to inhale and exhale in the breeze through the open living room windows, as did the sound of the plastic knobs at the end of the drapery cords bouncing against the wall, as did the sensation of scalded flesh as tea spilled over the top of my cup onto my hand.

“When.” I said.

“Is Joe Safdie’s head loose?” Barb asked.

“No Barb,” I said, “he just waves his head around that way when he talks — it’s just a habit.”

“Is it attractive?”

“I don’t know, Barb — you’ll have to ask another girl that question.”

“Well tell me how it happened.”

“It’s just a mannerism that someone develops … an idiosyncrasy.”

“Mark … Mark … Mark … Not that. How did the accident, that you may have had, happen?”

“Aaaaaaaaaw Barbara.…”

Then the phone rang. It was Lisa.

“I can’t talk now. I’m in the shower. Bye.”

“Aaaaaaaaaaaw Barbara.… It was between Cascade and Baseline. I was on my way to Chautauqua. They move so slowly. They crossed the street so slowly.”

“Did you kill em? Did you kill em?” she asked and her eyes got real big.

“I don’t know. They move so slowly it’s hard to tell if they’re dead or alive.”

“There’d be dents in your car if you hit anyone.” Barbara said, blending some soy sauce into a bowl of mayonaisse with a wicker-handled whisk.

“I don’t know. They’re very thin — like sparrows — almost not there — with awful anorexic pallors. They’d fall like candle-pins.”

From the window I could see my Datsun. And I could see the balled-up mimeographed sheets that teased and capered about its full tires. I kept a megaphone near the window so that in case a youth leaned on the hood or set a milk dud on the windshield and poised his fist above, I could broadcast my vehement anger below and watch him flee. The car was, after all, my responsibility. From the window, I could see the Flat-irons, not quite piebald with snow and rock and not quite hypertrophically lush with green growth — but in between. I used to stand on the balcony and watch the setting sun imbrue the sky with its puce and blue-indigo stains and then fall down, deep in the Rockies where it would rattle around in the night like a black roulette ball. Then I’d go back inside and watch the news. Then maybe make chopped-meat and Rice-a-Roni, then have coffee. Then later take a glossy girl from the stack, from my seraglio of magazines, and rock against the cool sheets in a cool sweat and fall asleep before I could even mess.

“There’d be blood on your car if you hit anyone.” Barbara said.

“What?”

“There’d be blood on your car if you hit anyone.”

“I don’t know. I think I went right to a car wash. And then I went to Baseline Liquors.”

“What happened there?”

“The guy there said ‘How ya doing today?’ and I said ‘I can’t believe how much beer costs’ and he said ‘It’s really something’ and I asked ‘Does it just keep going up all the time or what?’ and he said ‘Every time they bring the fuckin stuff in — it’s gone up …’ ”

“Wait a second,” Barbara said.

“What?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“And then I said ‘It’s always because something else from somewhere else is costing someone else more,’ and he said ‘The big companies got their heads together on this thing,’ and I said ‘The oil companies sure do’ and he reached over the counter and grabbed my lips and pulled them apart so that all my gums were showing and I had him shred one of those free entertainment guides across my teeth and with two of the shreds, I demonstrated how asymptotic lines and hyperbolae never meet and I said that this also shows why Mendel, the Austrian botanist, and Joe Tex, the American singer, would never meet — and then he began to weep. ‘What is it?’ I asked ‘I’m weeping,’ he said, ‘because I’m sad that Mendel and Joe Tex will never meet.’ ”

“That asymptotic line business was a mean trick,” Barbara said.

“I know. But anyway — then, for some reason, I told him that he wasn’t like an M&M — that he’d melt in my mouth and in my hands.”

“Did he yell at you? Did he chase you out?” Barbara asked.

I looked at her. “Why do you cover your neck. It’s either covered with your hair or you wear turtle-necks. Why don’t you either wear your hair up in buns or gathered, at least, in braids or ponytails and not wear turtle-necks.”

“Those … are your ideas,” she said bitterly.

I decided to consult a hypnotist in order to find out exactly what had happened. I picked one out of the yellow pages. He was located on Canyon Boulevard. He took me back into his apartment which he apparently used as his office. It was a mess.

“Before I got into hypnosis,” he said, “I used to run the Boulder Institute of Balneology. The science of baths. Everyone specializes these days. There aren’t any general balneologists anymore.”

“What was your specialty?” I asked.

“Cyst soaking.”

Then he said “Let’s get down to business.”

I inquired as to his methods.

“My method’s one of the latest. What I’m going to have you do, Mark, is to wash dishes until you fall into a trance,” he said, pointing to a sink full of dirty skillets, and saucepans and utensils, “If that doesn’t work we’ll have you vacuum and dust and do some laundry until the trance is achieved.”

“Well,” I said, “let’s get going,”

Two hours later, I’d cleaned the whole kitchen, made the beds, shampooed the rugs and straightened the book shelves and magazine racks.

“Well,” I asked, “what did I say?”

“Mark,” he said, plucking the check from my hand, “we’ve found that relating to the patient the details of what he’s said under hypnosis is generally contraindicated. Have a nice day.”

“You too.” I said.

When I got back to the apartment, Barbara was at the stove.

“I haven’t read about anyone being killed,” she said.

“How could you have — we never see a newspaper around here.”

“Well, we would’ve heard.”

“I think I heard about it — I think I heard one of the Tai Chi people talking — he said ‘Because of these murders, the whole Tai Chi community is very tense. And we hate being tense. And we hate ourselves for hating something. And we can’t stand the anxiety that brews in the self-hatred. So we’re all really unbalanced.’ And then they asked him what games Tai Chi people like to play with their kids when they get bored in the car on long trips — and he said, spotting the most license plates from a particular state, or naming state capitals, or the animal-mineral-vegetable game. Then he said, ‘Once, a Tai Chi person hit a toll attendant in the forehead with a quarter because he thought it was one of those change receptacles. We think that’s a funny story — and when we think something’s funny — we laugh.’ ”

Then the phone rang. It was Lisa.

“I can’t talk — I’m in the middle of shaving. Bye.”

Barbara started to tickle me. “Don’t,” I giggled. “I’ll keep doing it if you laugh.” I couldn’t stop laughing though — so she wouldn’t stop tickling me. I was in convulsions. At one point, she tickled me so well that my body had a great spasm and my head crashed through the television screen. Everyone was in there.

“I gotta get out of here for awhile,” I said, “while I’m gone I wonder if you could do that seam on my blue corduroy jacket.”

I kept trying to fly to the District of Columbia. But each time, the plane would take off from Denver, fly for four hours or so and then land in Denver — and the passengers would get up and stretch and reach into the overhead luggage compartments for their coats, queue up and deplane, as if we’d really arrived in the District of Columbia after all. But I doubt we ever had.

Each day I’d watch the newspaper boy arrive at my apartment and stand in the center of the complex’s vast atrium and toss the papers up towards the second and third floor balconies. But he could never reach the apartments and the papers would just fall back to the ground. And he’d throw them again and they’d fall short again. Then he’d throw them with more force and they’d land on the roof. Then he’d throw them a little softer and they’d hit the balcony’s railing and tumble back to the ground. Then much much harder and they’d fly over the roof. And finally he’d leave, not having delivered a single paper. So tenants were held virtually incommunicado from the world and not infrequently there’d be screams from apartment windows “Is it baseball season or basketball?!”

Another week began on the radio. Air blew through the heat vent and someone in an adjoining apartment was using their garbage disposal. These were things I noticed. Because in many ways I lived with my apartment and not in it, I knew its moods and habits. I thought the apartment was so horny. I looked for its diary everywhere. It must have longed for something as neuter and clean as it was. Within its confines, I could smell myself and vent in the inexpressible ways an unexpurgated hatred of the other women I wanted desperately desperately to just hold me and kiss me — that would be better than fucking — just being held. A friend lent me his guitar and one night I just played Under The Boardwalk. Under The Boardwalk Under The Boardwalk Under The Boardwalk “On a blanket with my baby …” These were the feelings I held. The walls of the apartment were covered with lipstick marks of big inhuman kisses. The next morning I woke up and began to live more realistically. I ate breakfast quickly and put my sweat pants and orange sweat shirt on and drove to the basketball courts at the Williams Village dormitories. As I entered the court, there was an almost unprecedented ovation and I sang the Everly Brothers’ “never knew what I missed until I kissed ya” as I dribbled. It was there, I think, at mid-court, beneath the clouds’ pink under-bellies, that I decided that the most prudent and expedient thing I could do was leave Boulder.

I made up my mind not only to relocate but to assume a new identity. To weather the future under cover. To lose myself in the great anonymity of the mid-west. I applied to an exchange program that would place me with a mid-western farming family. And with greater dispatch than I could have hoped for, I received notification that I’d been accepted and that I was to join my new family at the first opportunity. The speed with which my application was processed was due, I think, to the unassailable discretion with which I’d answered the application’s queries. Where it asked why I wanted to live with a farm family, I wrote, “Because I like farmers.” Where it asked why I liked farmers, I put, “First the farmers angered Washington residents by trampling the mall and driving their tractors into the reflecting pools, but then really charmed them by plowing capital motorists out from under that uncharacteristically heavy snowfall. And some farmers even sought a brief respite from controversy beneath snowy monuments and dashed off impassioned letters to wives and sweethearts.” And on the part of the application where it asked what kind of letters the farmers sent, I put: “Dear Helen, If you got telephone cable and wrapped it around all the planets and stars so that if you wanted to you could call other galaxies and universes you would not speak to a finer prettier best-cookinest gal than you are Helen. I mean it too, brown eyes.”

Needless to say, I was delighted at the sudden prospect of being able to live quietly, and without constant foreboding.

I called my friend Bianca and invited her to the Boulderado for a drink. It’s funny, y’know I even remember what we had — she drank Spanish coffee and I had bourbon and soda. And while we were drinking, the waiter brought a telephone over, “It’s for you, sir.” It was Lisa.

“I can’t talk now,” I said, “I’m insulating. I’ve got fiberglass all over me. Bye.” I hung up and called Barbara.

“Listen Barbara, I’m having a drink with Bianca at the Boulderado. Call up the airline and make a reservation for me.”

“Forget it,” she said, “If it’s so important to have a drink with Bianca, let her make your calls.”

“Look Barb, do as I say or I’ll read your letters to a room full of English 119 students.”

When I got back to the apartment, Barbara was on the floor, filling a syringe with soy sauce and mayonaisse. She clenched and unclenched her fist a few times, looped her belt around her arm and pulled it tight with her teeth.

I could see the words at the bottom of the glass I’d been drinking from.

Barbara turned to me, “There are cops in the kitchen.”

There were four cops disguised as three cops. One cop was part wasp, part fascist pederast. One cop was short and fat. One cop was drenched in Aqua Velva. They were in my kitchen.

My heart hit the linoleum like a clump of dough, with a real bottom of the ninth splat that evaporated into a cloud of valerian vapor, a real gaseous calm, a real back-to-mom, a real relieved throb. Cause being caught for the wrong thing is the loftiest exoneration there is. And maybe they got me for stealing cigarettes from King Soopers, or stealing books from Brillig Works, or reading other people’s letters in the mail room, or stealing newspapers from other apartment complexes, or lying without let-up, lying about the woman I love without question so other women will sleep with me, or napping when most of the citizenry is slaving away, or keeping my sea-onion in the closet or overbreading my chicken or being myopic and algophobic and predatory.

“Big deal,” I said. “Big shit. What’s the big fuss all about,” I said, as they led me outside to the car.

I stopped walking and tilted back my head and for a minute just felt the rain fall on my face and for just a second it felt like being very young again … another little kid who’d skated in his dress shoes across the frozen ponds that had formed on the settlement’s big plans, for a big future, for big thinkers, with big wallets, on big behinds.

“Asshole.” I said.

Taken off the face of the earth.

From its static electricity and unctuous detergents.

“Face of the earth!” I swore.

I swore at the crowd of things I knew.

And someone yelled from a window, “Is it hockey season or baseball?”

“Asshole season,” I said, “Asshole season.”