I Smell Esther Williams

Books by
MARK LEYNER

I Smell Esther Williams
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
Et Tu, Babe
Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog

I’ve given the raft with the woman you’ve been waiting for a little push so you should be receiving her any day now. She has a very deep cleavage like liz taylor. You may have to thaw her out. She is dead like I am.

I am doing my impersonation of the new jersey shore. I, of course, am lying on my side and masturbating into a bedpan that I’ve banged into a likeness of deep cleavage. If the costa rican nurse touches my nipple, I tell her that the nipple is the living room of a run-down two-family house by the sea. If she puts her eiderdown electron-image tubes to both my nipples and only if she shows me her shiny gold molars and sings Tengo Cabanga Por Mi Patria, I tell her that two escaped convicts from the woman’s house of detention are in the living room, pulling taffy and watching a television show with the sound off, and if she brings me seconds for lunch when chicken fried steak is served, I pretend that they are snorting thick lines of crystal speed, and I promise her jewelry. If she draws a picture of what she thinks the raft woman’s ass would look like projected on a drive-in movie screen without lifting her pencil from the paper, I open the living room door and mr. and mrs. hogan, a couple from philadelphia, enter and I pull her dress up over my head and we hypnotize each other and
pretend that we have no control over what we say or do. If it is late at night, we pretend that we have lost the right to vote and that we have been sterilized by missionaries. We pretend that we have cut the moorings and let the raft drift away, that we are exiled on an island for savage morons.

The woman who I’m sending knows all about you. We have spent many nights reminiscing about you and laughing about your ingenuous kindnesses and social clumsiness. She is impressed by your poems and surmises that, as a child, you must have been force fed like farm poultry. Of course she is drifting very peaceably now right towards you. It’s a fine sunny day. She and the raft look marvelous, rocking in the tide. She is doing her impersonation of an automobile showroom. You would enjoy it very much. She, of course, is lying on her back and the sun is glistening against all her automobiles, her sedans, her squared-off economy models, her red convertibles. If she draws a thin piece of kelp across the inner part of her thigh, like a bow across a violin string, you can hear all your favorite buddy holly songs. I, of course, am on my knees, peering through an antique vasco da gama spyglass, watching her revolve in momentary eddies. I too am enjoying her uncanny impersonation of an automobile showroom. If the nurse brings me a fat pungent smelling costa rican cigar, I pretend that I am a newspaper boy in a vintage 1930’s style newspaper boy’s cap. If she takes off her starched white nurse’s cap, unfastens her bobby pins and lets her luxurious black tresses fall into my eyes, I enter the automobile showroom and yell, extra! extra! yeshiva boy slays showgirl whale swallows mob kingpin bald cure called hoax mets split! She in turn impersonates mrs. hogan. I think we want fifteen automobiles! she says, Look how fast my husband is! Mr. hogan runs from car to car spinning the plates he’s balanced on each antenna. Of course she’s drifting towards you now! She is coming to you of her own volition. Do not let that disturb you. It was, in large part, her idea. Oh, look. The raft has a nice teakwood desk. She is writing a letter. She will either put the
letter in a bottle and throw it at me or save it for you. At the end of the letter, after recapitulating the ups and downs of her epically repressed life, she writes, p.s., I want the second movement of mozart’s piano concerto in b flat major played at my funeral. She begins to lose weight. I enter a room where people are frantically pacing back and forth. Everyone thinks I look negro, I say. I am, of course, dying. I’ve placed two hundred dollars on furrowed brow in the sixth at aqueduct for you. She will be exhausted when she reaches you. She will be almost dead. My life is over. The nurse is doing her impersonation of an afternoon in bethesda, maryland. I pretend that I am a house. When she gives me a blowjob, I tell her that someone in the house is doing yoga exercises and that someone is painting the maid’s room institution-green. The woman I’m sending you has taken off her bathing suit top. You will like her breasts very much. She is doing her famous impression of someone who takes three hours to eat a teaspoon of potato salad. The nurse says that mr. hogan is in a deep trance now. King me. Checkmate. Gin, he says. The bed is masquerading as the sauna at seton hall university. A young man named theo enters. Let’s go down on each other, he says. My nurse is playing the role of a girl with very beautiful red pubic hair. You’re not the most subtle guy in the world, she says. He bites her stomach. Yum! she says, Your whiskers are like porcupine quills. My father’s pizzeria is the best in new jersey, he says. Oooooo! she says, You’re clever, too! The costa rican nurse, who, admittedly, represents a repressed feral idealization of my mother, collapses to the floor and does her impersonation of a molting boa constrictor.

I am skipping smooth flattened stones in the direction of the drifting raft. I am trying to get the woman’s attention. She is now a shape. A nude chiaroscuro set in relief against the horizon. I cup my hands and yell, I was sitting in the library when I first heard two members of the parnassian society whispering your name back and forth. Remember? There were only two books in the entire library that hadn’t been taken out—Portable
Power Tools by leo macdonnell and.… The Penicillin Man by john rowland, she calls out to me. I begin to weep because she has remembered. There are some things, she calls out, that a woman never forgets. I pretend that the cliff rising above the dark water is a lovers’ leap. We jump. She is doing her impersonation of a woman who has jumped before. The raft is disappearing now.

My life is over. It has been over for months now. I am sending this woman to you partly because we have preyed on each other’s consciences far too long, and partly because you are my only friend and this is the woman you have been waiting for, for so many years. She is dead like I am. You too will be dead soon. When she arrives, do not mince words. Do not pretend with her.

Stalking from place mat to place mat in a livid dudgeon. A voice skating beneath the exposed heat units, the new architecture of relationships with its freed russet scaffolding and its exigent separations, halves across the continent, elastic couples with gummy attenuating arms reaching across the midwest, different weathers.

Last night was my best lie, integrity peeled like an adhesive price tag. Then there was a violently styled adjudication, a kind of slapstick justice. A trial by pies.

You’ll notice the foliage, the bus fumes, the heavy matronly arms reeling in the clothes-line of condoms. It’s so Secaucus-like. So unreal. So unpleasant. It’s impossible to prognosticate. The metastasis of feeling. The crossing of state lines. Apprehension finally.

It’ll be nice seeing you again. What’s passed. Tense is an inhalation that’s held and finally released into a moment that is itself a darkening ember. The tub is filled with passing ships, a horizon of canary towels. A mirage of hips, a series of cosmopolitan glyphs, a brush that needs brushing. Strawberries springing from the tile’s crevices where once only mouldy
grout festered, and the ample closet space filled with its magazines and its ideas.

It’s three in the tire place across from the arena, lines of leaves divide the street, the schools are emptying out, you’re trying on boots and saying something and thinking of momentous things, the boots and boxes and stools and tissue paper, the offal of staunch consumerism, stores are closing early today, the proprietor plans on buying a can of fancy soup like oyster stew and a magnum of wine, you’re waiting for what, for who, the proprietor holds the door for you, you walk past the tire place and I knock against the glass, alerting squads of Cupids in the arena’s parapets, and the variety of twangs from their released bowstrings is like a sudden diapason of desire, and everything vanishes then but a feeling of regret about everything, the water cooler gurgles, lug wrenches and hubcaps enter the ark, closing time is upon the tired place. Outside is the world with its tremendous trap, that we ourselves, with unflagging industry, have baited. We catch ourselves thinking this way. Sitting nervously, thinking this way.