My Life in Heavy Metal (14 page)

She rolls her eyes.

So many guys talk about your chest. I'm sorry. I don't mean to embarrass you. Please don't be embarrassed. There's a loveliness there that makes them curious. That's all. You can't blame them for that. But I think they're missing it, Elena. I think with you it's the lower body, the
nalgas.
I've been meaning to tell you this for a while. I know it's not right, but I watch you walk through the office, the way you move, and I think: I'm not sure I can go through my life without knowing.

And there are provinces in which everyone does go about finding out, clusters of college graduates knotted at the bottom of tall cities, trying to invent community. Everyone has slept with everyone and they all drink together, hoping the alcohol and the music will restore some previously eluded glamour, or obscure its dissipation. Those few who haven't coupled operate at a disadvantage, edgy and prideful, untrammeled by ease. They watch the others sweat and sway, and imagine a daisy chain of limbs, themselves missing out. In this stewing lies the seed of future passes.

But what lies ahead is not our concern. Our concern is the present, the glorious now, the moment of erotic transfer—isotopic, dangling, a question mark awaiting exclamation.

* * *

In a rundown Stuttgart nightclub, two privates in the U.S. Army have arrived to hear jazz, arrived separately. They are from different divisions, have never met. The club is in the historic district, miles from the biergartens where their comrades fill themselves with liters of pale pilsner and oily sausage, counting colored bills for later descent on the hookers of this drizzled ashen city.

Technically, it's not even jazz on display in this blue-lit club. It's cabaret, the music of campy self-announcement, feather boas and top hats and tulle stockings and whorish makeup, and each of the privates drinks in the burly innuendo, sipping at sophisticated drinks, sneaking glances at each other, wondering. Between acts, the one named Shane spots the other leaning against the bar, uniform neatly tucked, back curving gracefully, the muscles under his shirt shifting like dunes.

Shane bites a piece of ice, moves to join him. They talk about where they are stationed, what their hitch is—awkward, beginning things. The lights vanish and another round of drinks gets drunk and another set of skits begins, more good-time tunes set against a black velvet curtain, a tall tenor with pasted-on mustache and a chanteuse treated rather sadly by the years (though, they agree, surely lovely as a maiden).

The hours roll by and the drinks loosen them and soon they are confessing which high school shows they were in, bursting into stagy refrains. The hour is close to curfew, but the closing spectacle is more than either private could have expected. The old singer is up on the bar flashing her fallen thighs and the tenor is leaping from table to table in patent-leather wing tips and the two privates are suddenly at the center of a spotlight with a microphone under their chins, thrown together in voice, led laughing through a wobbly chorus of
Auf Widersahn
by the older patrons.

Shane turns to his new companion and breathes the hot breath of want and with nothing so much as this asks to be folded into this stranger's body and kept there for the night.

This is what the whole business is about: night. Without night, its hungering canvas, its needy musk and daring sediments, without all this, the amorous among us would fold our tents and, like Long-fellow's Arabs, as silently steal away.

He met her through a mutual friend and now she is in his home and he is cooking for her, chopping mushrooms and boiling water for pasta, washing the cupboard dust off his wineglasses. He has learned to cook a few meals from TV chefs and knit these into the tight circle of his life. His business—consulting—sucks him through airports and phones and flights and conferences and beepers and burgers and sour suits and occasionally he suspects he is missing something. Not daughters or wives or azaleas, but the sense of his body as experienced against another. Night illuminates this need, tenders it, demands a dividend.

This woman in his apartment, she is—what? A nurse or a stenographer. A piano teacher. She exhibits patience worthy of a bygone era. He sees her traveling the Oregon Trail in a long plain dress, mending things. Her fingers are strong, able-looking. There is something steadying just in the way she holds her chardonnay, cupped in both hands. She leans against the fridge carefully. Her eyes seem to want to dip beneath the surface of his words, toward more telling information.

She is not someone he thinks of as pretty. There are flaws, which his life surrounded by advertising draws out, distorts. Slight underbite. Flat bottom. Saggy arms. The defects are not small. But then, there is him. Sometimes, before bed, he catches sight of himself in the bathroom mirror and sees his father.

They are here because he invited her. Night fell around him, his first one home after a cross-country trip, and something in the yellowing of the streetlamps outside his building left him bereft. He remembered his friend pressing this woman's number onto him, how he had avoided calling her, thinking:
she must be desperate.
When he finally got her on the phone, two nights later, he was the one who felt desperate, trying to play the idea off as an impulse.

He continues to chop and she pours herself more wine and moves around his apartment, inspecting. He knows about her: she has been married before, she has a child who is away for the week, she is the same age he is. He knows
about
her. She glances at his stack of unopened mail, as if she would like to sort through it, as if she doesn't quite trust him to separate the junk from the significant.

He puts the knife down and tilts up his wine, stopping when he feels a slight burn against his gums. He slips out of his shoes and approaches her from behind and her neck is there, warm. He knows this could happen only from behind, that he is sneaking up on himself as much as her. He closes his eyes and hopes.

Or a wedding. Sure. Why not? They still hold them. Big distracted churchy affairs glittering with pearls or earnest runty ones on damp lawns. The nudnik photographer, the sweaty caterers, weeping mothers and black sheep beckoned back, the bow-tied band and the
bride and groom helpless with goodwill. It still goes on in all these places, San Leandro and Mount Kisco and Wallingford, and, at the fringe of it, behind the rectory or out near the pool, a bridesmaid stares ardently at a groomsman. They have had much to drink, as weddings recommend.

She is so proud of her friend, she says, and the groomsman agrees. It is something to be proud of. She is so beautiful. Yes. Never seen her so radiant. Yes. Beautiful. And him, too. He didn't look so tall in the photos. How tall is he? Six-foot-three. Wow.

He is thinking about the bachelor party, about the stripper called Danielle, between whose breasts his nose spent a brief and thrilling span, shocked at the scent (shoe leather and cinnamon) and the firmness of whatever held them aloft. This moony bridesmaid—with her wedge of a face and colored contacts, her peach chiffon dress and matching pumps—she is no Danielle. She is a creature in sad real time. Her nakedness cannot be anything men would pay to see, though men, if protected by payment, will look at almost anything.

And anyway, she is here before him, full of crab ravioli and champagne, swallowing back burps and twisting her bangs between her fingers. She hasn't the will to execute the pass. She can only display her markings, touch her body in ways that might induce in him a mimetic response.

He is at his leisure to consider this, to ease back on his ankles and assess the pros and cons. She is homely; there is that. Yet her homeliness weighs on him favorably, accents his moderate beauty. This is a wedding and there is drink and hopes run deep on such occasions, but not so expectations. All pageantry inspires fantasy, no matter how shabby. And besides, she is wearing these prim peach pumps, shoes that will never be used again, which almost demand to be torn off, bitten at in mock depravity.

He is not certain about kissing, though, not just yet. And so he lowers his hand down the front of her dress and lifts her breast so that it puddles on his palm and so that he can hear his name on her tongue.

In every life, such deciding places must be reached. Especially in this era of frantic indecision, with its impatient sun and hammering moon, with its pathological ulteriority, when it seems a wonder that two people might ever agree to anything like terms. Day after fallen day, these odd delicious moments on which so much depends; unwrapped like papered pears, held close to nose, sniffed, tasted.

In the downtown bar, where Bill or Mike or Chuck has pinned his hopes on the sleeve of Rachel, Liz, Michele: a failure he could not have foreseen. (For if he had, why should he have invited her here and spent his money and time and dwindling predator energy?) She looks at his hand on her arm and smiles politely. She sighs, and in her sigh invokes the nearest cliché: nothing personal a bad time still recovering just met someone.

He envisions her dressed as Salome, the dance of her veils. If this were physical trauma, the endorphins would come sloshing in to spare him. He would not hear the chant of looming humiliation, or feel suffused by brittle hate for this woman, who is no longer a woman, only something he will never have. The electricity in his arm, with which he hoped to jolt her into panting collaboration, shuts down. The bartender freezes. The skyscrapers go dark. The set is struck.

* * *

The airport pair have no such trouble. The airlines, after all, have arranged passage to a nearby hotel. Inside his room, the man who looks like a gangster shucks his suit, steps into the shower, pleased at the water's scalding pulse, emerging pink, soapy. On his bed: the woman who missed her flight to Denver. She is in towels, one around her chest, one twirled on her head. Older with her makeup scrubbed, her flesh unbundled. Nothing like Ingrid Bergman, with her slender white nose and her shadows. Nothing like his wife for that matter, who drinks protein shakes and runs half-marathons. Nothing like anyone he could have ever seen himself lying beside in a hotel room near the airport. And for this reason, an object of intense fascination to his body, which responds along predictable lines. They are not graceful, or pretty. He lunges, she groans. They press together. The entire project fills no more than a few minutes. But when he reaches for one of her cast-away towels she grabs his wrist. “Wait,” she says. “I like to let it dry.”

This, more than anything, more than his refusal to bestow upon her a goodnight kiss, more than his stiff retreat from her mouth, more than the silent next-morning shuttle ride, will haunt him. He has always worried that he looks like a thug, ever since his nose was broken by a bully in high school. The sight of his ejaculate spattered on her belly jolts loose a memory, this bully staring hard at a pornographic photo in a mildewy gym, now thirty years ago, announcing:
That broad is a waste of good sperm.

And what of Geoff, at the center of the warm suburban home unspooling his patter to Elena, who looks like a Modigliani? He too has misjudged. And he too will suffer a mortification, though
not of the flesh. He reaches for her ankle and she pulls away and his chest stumbles. She stands quickly and moves to join her boyfriend in the kitchen. Soon it will be announced to those assembled that the couple are engaged. And still later he will see the two of them outside, nuzzling against a car.

Closer to morning, with his own girlfriend curled away from him, Geoff will see things as they are: that he coveted Elena's innocence not as a thing to defile but as a remedy. Beneath the fantasy of ravaging her was the fantasy that she would rescue him, stroke his brow and somehow cure him of his tired contempt for everything. With her, he might have become the sort of man who desires purely, rather than the sort who seeks betrayal at the center of a foolish party. He will never feel quite sure of himself again.

The old torch singer is surprised and pleased by the presence of two young American soldiers. She dispatches the proprietor of the club to invite them backstage: the madame would like to say hello after she has changed. PFC Shane and his companion are led to a small room with a single old love seat. The light is soft, roseate. There is the pleasant, cherryish smell of pipe tobacco. Their thighs brush.

But now Shane wonders if this might not be an elaborate setup. He has heard tell of such things, MPs descending with billy clubs. Then, too, there is the ambiguity of his new friend's responses: a fluttery hug in the shadows, that lopsided grin, which could mean anything. When you are a soldier like PFC Shane, you learn to love quickly, to grasp and gulp and be done with it. Besides, there is the curfew to be considered.

Now the diva makes her appearance, shorter than she seemed on the bar, modestly wrapped in a chenille robe. French cigarettes in a silver case. A cocktail in a tall goblet. She lived for a number of years in Houston, Texas. Do they know the place? An oil baron kept her as his mistress. All quite scandalous. She was terribly lonely in her glass and marble flat on Carr Street, like a princess in her tower. This
awl
baron—her imitation makes them giggle—used to come and pounce on her. Fat and hairy as a woodchuck, with a prick like a jackass. When you are young, she says, it all seems enough. But love is the most important thing of all, don't you agree? How old are you boys? Really, that young? Well it's time you learned the first rule of love: Never hide. Love must be acknowledged by the touch of days. And here she makes her exit, leaving them her dressing room and the time to decide for themselves.

What a trip, Shane says.

Yeah, says his new friend. Pretty amazing. The boy's arm falls across Shane's shoulders. His mouth is a wet red arrow.

Yeah.

The consultant has placed his lips to her neck and she has responded with the consent of her body, turning against him, lifting her face. She is there and ready. But now he is unsure. The pass sits wrong with him, plunging dread where the flutter should be. All he can imagine is the moment after physical release, when the soul, the patient soul, reasserts sovereignty. This is the war that never ends: the body's simple needs set against the soul's byzantine wants, each accusing the other of insufficient grace.