I Smell Esther Williams (3 page)

A man unloading baskets, bags and livestock from the top of a bus gives us directions to a modest hotel.

Next day, at the tourist information kiosk in the bus station, we are told to follow a boy who will take us to the rental agent.

He has a creaky old red schwinn he rides every morning along the man-made inlets where people dock their catamarans and sunfish, where ducks in groups of three and four glide by, and he throws them pieces of Carr’s Table Water Crackers which are the most popular crackers on the island, and these rides every morning before most people have arisen make him
tan and less burdened with a feeling of responsibility for the heart attack his father had when he withdrew from law school and moved in with two waiters/actors.

We take a room in a boarding house on Bonnet Monkey Street. We can see through a hole into another room. Orange and yellow balloons are strung on the walls. Ribbon is strung from the light fixture and attached to something. It’s orange fluted ribbon. Don’t, says a man, pouring soda into paper cups. The woman lies on the couch wears fluffy blue slippers reads the newspaper. Habit, says the man. The woman is cleaning up paper plates. Some of the miniature plastic baskets still have hershey bars and fruit candies in them. These she collects. The woman leans back on a cushion she’s put on the floor and reads a thick novel.

Lester: Look.

Connie: Let’s eat.

Lester: When? Now?

The next night, I pack my suitcase.

Roz thanks me for having driven everyone to the island.

Connie and Lester are on the porch talking. They look particularly handsome this night.

Do you see that thing over there? Connie asks Lester.

I don’t.

It looks like the thing you ate before.

I can’t. I couldn’t have, Lester says.

See that ceramic bulldog? Crouched by that basket of dried reeds? Next to it? That’s the head cardiologist at St. Barnabas

I see them backwards. I have this kind of spatial strephosymbolia.

Connie takes a rubber band off her wrist, and gathers her chestnut brown hair into a ponytail and doubles the elastic around it.

August will be over in five seconds, I say.

One.

(Close-up of Connie’s face)

Two.

(Close-up of Lester’s face)

Three.

(Close-up of Connie’s face)

Four.

(Close-up of Lester’s face)

Five.

Moonlight breaks across the embrasure of the window. The tide is out. Connie and Lester have waded almost three hundred feet from the beach, and they are only in to their waists.

Here we are again. A pulsing monotonous breathing of accordions. A confluence of dyes.

There is a kind of crystalline monumentality to the spots of peptides which lead like footprints down the forested mountainside to Lake Lugano where you have been brought by Sikorsky helicopter and I by Otis elevator, where a sprig of orange blossoms hovers weightlessly over your bosom, where penniless flâneurs and chess theoreticians in red berets writhe like storm clouds in this, the watery sector of the zodiac. There is a periodical wiping out of the impressions received on the visual projection cortex, but are you the anonymous friend who sent me a subscription to Ebony magazine on the anniversary of my hernia?

The sun is still, like a butterfly held in resin. The street is bordered by trees whose branches poke out like cocktail toothpicks. Listen. It sounds like the music a Russian would figure skate to. Sidewalk merchants sell boiled beets, chestnuts, and noodle soup, reason has been discarded in favor of ecstasy, and, like mice eating cheese in a cartoon, it registers deep in your mood ring. Like Napoleon, my pockets are stuffed with letters too foolish to send, but I have found aspects of your face among the brittle flakes of paint beneath this radiator, in tar
pools of eolithic ax heads and stegadon bones, and in the frescoed boudoir of mr. and mrs. cork supplier. Here and there! Simpering like an organ grinder’s monkey. But tonight the lentissimo rhythms of our smoldering frames will rub away the past because you are my pink eraser, my integer with no factor except yourself and one, and I am the mischievous kitten toying within your petticoats.

Here we are again, glued to the floor of a matinee, at the apiary, in the methedrine factory, in the lush breadfruit grove near Montego Bay where we curtsied like mechanical toys until dawn in a oceanfront cabana called the ancien-régime that was as accessible as Manhattan, that was like a display at Gimbels for swimwear, and even dummies have feelings, even marionettes complain of headaches, even porcelain geese have a vague sense of haplessness, even a glass of seltzer harbors a kind of festering “what if such and suchness”, so however one audits the figures, they add up, and the sum is a snowballing of coy, timid indiscretions, of pot-valiant audacity, of jammed broadcasts, of inadvertent breaches of confidence, of bungled trysts, unscrupulous geisha girls, and mislabeled blood types, so here we are, mio dolce amore, at the homecoming it took chains to secure.

Before I go to the guillotine, I have one thing to say and though it may sound like it is a far far better thing I do than I have ever done, what I really mean is this, if your reserve of renewable energy sources dwindles dangerously low, burn these documents, this itinerary for dominoes, before you burn your bridge chairs, your diving board, your combustible scenery and if it annoys you, don’t swallow hormones and jump out a window like some kind of new yorker; but when, out of the corner of your eye, you mistook the red kinney shoes sign for the sunset, and rush hour traffic for the rio grande, the shot glass shook in my hand, and now in the dining car the air is thick with the chalky debris of this wobbling orbit and the slightest pang feels isometric and giddy and wanton like so many handfuls of hair, because I have drawn asbestos dust into
my lungs and drunk the milk of michigan and dragged you out of an impending marriage for twelve hours in plain night.

But now it’s just evening and you are a cure for ulcers, so would it turn you on more if I spilled this mug of chicken and stars down the front of your blouse or if I took a job in Trenton and called you every morning at four o’clock panting like this ahh ahhh whack smash ahh ahhh whack smash or if I sprayed your lanky and girlish nakedness with insecticide and lapped it up like a cockroach languidly grooming its legs, because I’ll do it darling, I’ll do it you knock-kneed big-toothed rebecca of up-state new york, we can guzzle manischewitz concord grape and make it grand guignol style … just look around, we don’t have much time, the night is a map with pins in it, the yokels are washing their children against rocks at the stream and refusing to send their laundry to public school.

Are you as weak as I am and do you need a drink or is this a foreign place more terrible because of its mysterious and regular occurrence or an empty savage custom bouncing a basket on its buttocks or are you trembling are you as weak as I am because here a river of fresh water runs out of the sea into a dark cavern because the fish have no color and breed in your pipes like eyes in the darkness and there is in those small piercing eyes an expression which no painter can render or because retroactively you are beginning to feel the advantages of steady self-denial and to experience the pleasures of property? I am not trembling because I don’t know if the lips of your vagina are flesh or rouge and dough but are you trembling because I am trembling because I’ve been bathing with horns or rubbing clay into my wet yarn because like Dürer I have portrayed St. Michael fighting the dragon in a shower of diarrhea because I have used you without adequate ventilation?

Oh, night of the underprivileged whites. The noise of you gulping maalox woke me from a dream about soaking your sister-in-law in epsom salts and though your sister-in-law is not an intellectual at least she can pronounce her own name correctly, but to you, every eastern-european name is a kind of
genito-urinary metaphor. You are fiercely heterosexual and well-formed, and it’s no one’s business that you’ve shrunk your parents and keep them in a terrarium, but you have a gatling gun for a mouth, and if that’s a diary you’re producing from your cleavage, I’m leaving. Who are you staring at—not that broad-shouldered svengali with soccer players do it better on his t-shirt? Could I interrupt your intratrachial injection of venom for a moment, or were you just going to the 7-11 for a slurpy in your crotchless suit of quills and steel-tipped espadrilles? Oh, if I could woo you for just a second, I would weaken you with blandishments and ply you with images of the soft life, of cucumber canapes and baked quince and firm Damson plums in port wine, of liveried chauffeurs and sandblasted gargoyles, of binding our neighbors in garlands of pigeons and searing them over bathtubs of blazing brandy, of ice-fishing in our quilted parkas with small bore pistols and geiger counters, and you’re saying it, oh god your mouth is on my pussy, I’m making you say it as if it’s a line on the teleprompter, oh god your mouth is on my pussy, and it’s so terrifically fraudulent, it’s so terrifically fraudulent—so much like mate in one move, like astroturf, like marzipan lungs, and this sensation of falling through a glass trampoline gives me an urgent hard-on.

You’re a real woman, a kind of lusting dionysian midget-wrestler nymphomaniac who leaks like an idling chevy malibu, you’re like game fowl, bark gum, venison, buffalo, you’re like a beef cannoli. But there’s a murderer in your station wagon, and his skull is a ballroom with a chorus girl inside, and his heart is a gnarled bladder, and tonight you will suffocate in the warmth of his yellow impetiginous cheeks, because he loves you, he loves you more than he loved the intoxicating breath of his orthodontist. Scrawled at his camp table, upon his map box, by the light of bivouac fires, his missives fill your postbox. Do you recognize his dueling scar? His silk taffeta briefs? He is the dimmest star in the punch and judy constellation and his message is this, don’t be cruel.

Yesterday when you were an idea in my head, yesterday when I rode this monorail through the Alhambra and you were an idea in my head, the idea of you was like a hot coil that boiled the other ideas and it boiled the other ideas until they were limp and jejune, until they were mush, and my head was sodden like a warm sponge and I laid it against the window and stared at the thin snaking line that marked that hour between then and this irradiated archipelago and only then could I open my eyes and I was like a speech being sent from one city to another and the speech became clearer and clearer as you faded away and it was very cold and very accurate and I crumpled your stationery and blotted the beads of perspiration from my forehead.

When your life passes before your eyes, everything is seen in the context of its calibration. You see the hours as circles like the sweep of a clock’s hands and you see the days as squares like the days on a calendar and the hours fill the days like little faces and each face is filled with its own frozen tableau. Are these the times you’re talking about? Are you talking about the time that I slid my hand under your blouse and ran my knuckles up and down the ridges of your backbone? Are you talking about the time that you rubbed your palm against my erection and curled your fingers around my balls or the time that I pressed your breasts as close together as they would go? Are you talking about the time that you arched your back and moved slightly from side to side or the time that you caressed the tip of my penis with your moist fingers? Are you talking about the time that I rubbed the fabric of your underpants between the lips of your vagina? Are you talking about the time that I erupted like Krakatoa, and covered the entire earth with a dust cloud that darkened the skies for a week? Are you talking about the time I became so excited that the head of my cock just burst and you were left with a mouthful of blood? Why do you announce—yah, dis is nils pedersen speakin-when you answer the phone? You are not nils pedersen, although there are mornings when, naked save a sock and my wristwatch, I feel like peggy cass or ignatius of loyola, but
…those stills from our past are faded daguerreotypes, memories held together with brittle crumbling sutures, voice boxes faintly gurgling in jars of formaldehyde, and now while you blow another bubble of saliva and I sink my last quarter in this panty hose machine, the moon like a magnet has warped our silhouettes and you have given my last two cigarettes cute nicknames and plugged them into your ears.

I am the vacuum cleaner salesman in this orbiting suburb, the slumbering widower, the little colorful head on your pillow, the frightful shock in your drink, the fob chain, tobacco, and cuff link in your caddy, the cherub-shaped pastille who scents the air in your gangrenous salon, and you are so many lines of whimsical tripe embroidered up and down my ass, a tasteless remake of your mother who herself was a platter of luncheon meats.

So, before the surgeon takes ten paces and aims his laser at my knotted skull, before he addresses this malignant growth with his 7-iron and takes a swing or two, before he says grace and sinks his carving knife into the sinew and gristle of my brain, I have one thing to say and though it may sound like death be not proud though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, what I really mean is this, your sister is too self-conscious about her weight and that’s why she had such a terrible time in Atlantic City. She never should have allowed that kind of silliness to dampen the pleasure of winning six thousand dollars. Now, suddenly, you seem thrilled that she’s finally met someone, but look who she’s invited into her life and inadvertently into yours—a man who’s indicted each tuesday and thursday, a man who whiles his time away suborning witnesses and garroting jurors, and doesn’t the thought of them making love in that squalid waterfront shack make it difficult for you to finish your spinach or is it somewhat exciting to imagine their rhythms amidst the ebb and flow of iridescent waters and the whirrr and thunk of flying cargo hooks? But I suppose you’re right, someday they’ll rope off his bathroom and charge admission, and there he’ll be, like Spinoza
grinding lenses in Rijnsburg, sticking his hand between two pieces of bread and taking a bite.