The Great Lover (7 page)

Inside the carpet, she stares in horror as the mouse in her hand transforms into a little naked man in white fibrous wadding — he’d been one in disguise, and now he’s dead and can only return to his former shape, not his former size. His body is whole, but he looks as though he’d fallen from a great height, lying there in her palm. Her heart swells with pity and sadness. But now it occurs to her that she might be able, for some reason she can’t be bothered to acknowledge at the moment, to restore him. No means present themselves. She lies back and imagines what would be nice if he were to join her there, at his proper size. He would see leeches of fire adhering to the raw nerve — flames sucking like leeches on a web of throbbing nerves...

This woman’s monotonous speech like rattling chain, ghosts stand clear the doors. There’s a metal plate on the floor, a circle with three concentric rings and four screws. A brown-skinned man with a devilish face, moustache, benign expression, his ears barely attached to his head sits opposite Dr. Thefarie. Also a nodding man who squints at everything. Look along the car to all the bobbing knees — doors open — Spargens, a big, boxheaded man with crumpled features, graying hair, huge glasses, points across the platform at a vagrant type hunched in the handicapped seat of the car on the parallel track. The vagrant is filthy, his head is nearly hidden in a chaotic profusion of clothing, and his eyes peer out with electric brightness like the beast in the jungle.

Dr. Thefarie nods almost imperceptibly, and Spargens shambles onto the vagrant’s car. Those electric eyes are fixed on a woman with dark, nape-gathered hair gathered at nape, white armless top, pale glasses, monkey-like expressions faintly traverse her fine-featured enchanting face.

I want to give her a long bath... she dreamt she stood naked before a huge audience and sang to them from the end of a long spotlight that breathed and sighed and caressed her.

*

Lovely bookish type, pale face, and shoulder-length straight black hair. The foggy mystery of her naked body takes shape in my mind. I see her sweet, inadvertently tranquil features. A memory dream... I think of her heavy bangs... white and death... stiff feelers rattle like dead boughs... I press my lips to her cold cheek, sticky with jam... cold child ghost Victorian...

She is borne away from me on the ghost train, where she rides with another man in a vampire cape. The cars roll off into the distance, pulled by a tiny locomotive trailing smoke against the mountains. I’ve left the track.

I pass a dead tree made from painted foam rubber and draped with paper maché spanish moss. I’m kicking through heaps of foam rocks. A huge cobweb, stretching from one dead tree to another, gets in my mouth and tangles in with my laces. Bit like cotton candy. These rocks hurt my feet, and I nearly fall. Wind rattles dead branches. I can hear an owl hooting. The soot and silver sky still seems as close as the backdrop had been. Clouds bisected by the horizon move swiftly by.

All the light from above goes out; only a wan glow from the phosphorescent ground mist remains, shining up on blue tombstones. Shrill cries come from the graves. Surrounded by a heap of brittle black wreaths is a stately bier, on which a glass coffin rests. A woman lies on her side within it, dressed in white lace, white stockings, black shoes. One hand lies on her hip, the other under her cheek. Low, funereal music rises from her — an organ, sounds like — and a woman’s voice quietly recites an elegy to its accompaniment.

I must see her face!

Her abundant black hair radiates from her head like a sheet of rippling water, and her face has been painted silver-blue, even her eyebrows and lashes. I notice that she is breathing peacefully and it shocks me like a physical blow makes his insides tremble. He strokes the glass tenderly, gazing in awe at her tranquil, sideways face. A weblike cloud of nerves curtains him its tendrils rub the coffin longingly. Somber voice, resignedly beautiful music, go on eternally in the ceremonial gloom here. But when he wakes up — I can’t remember it! I never saw her before! Who is she? I want to go back!

Old wives, if there are any left, will tell you that, if someone stares through a window persistently enough, that person’s image will faintly remain in the glass. Her face in my memory is just like that, I imagine. Only her expression stays with me, of which the music, and the voice if not so much the words, are a part. I want to go back!

*

Elfin woman, lean as a rail, poised, tasteful, a little extravagant, bewitching texture of her skin as the light from the candle on the table makes it glow, in the V of her shirt where her skin is stretched over the bone. I forget himself. His behavior becomes artificial, painfully self-conscious. Picking up a paper he isn’t interested in reading, he holds it before his face at an unnatural angle, moving his head ostentatiously back and forth, screwing up his mouth with apelike concentration as though he were devouring every word. Meanwhile he keeps looking back in her direction in a way so flamboyantly concealed as to become only more obvious, reeking with embarrassment. Pretending to search his pockets, his stinking clothes flabby as wet sacks, for some elusive personal item gives him a painfully transparent pretext to turn his head in her direction. The dear knife is gradually stabbed into me, through my eyes. The icy shit of strangers runs down my legs and pools at my feet.

Love at last sight, half-formed phantom of desire mechanically snuffed out by shuffling feet, subway doors, time tables, the phone company. Life, élan vital complete with foul smells and slimes, invisible beneath layers of muck in me, somehow sticks through to me, urging me on to collect and shelter all those stillborn phantoms as it did the cadavers I rescued from being forgotten.

He won’t fight I, it. The night in that place gathered together like a sheaf of wheat and was cut in half by the bow-shaped ruby edge of her upper lip, hard and elastic. I sit on the fire escape and tiny cherries adorn the branches — I have only to move my hand to pick them. They sprout directly from the branch, long tubes with brilliant red bulbs at the end. Eating these cherries would be like plucking off bits of rash; they would tear free with a soft rip, a relief for the sighing tree. I look in through the window, into her bedroom. She is somewhere in the remoter parts of the apartment, arranging something. There is a table by the sill, and on it there is a folded map with

CITY OF SEX

in a white panel. Like the City of Destruction, or the City of Commerce.

Some severe-looking models with sad, scrawny bodies, are sitting by the door and ducky is a lean young woman with big glasses — mannerisms of a dowager professor, also of a girl raised entirely among adult WASPs probably already middle-aged when she was born. Her smile is apologetic, but she is lit up with happiness now, who knows why, and bright clean neatness. Walks past me holding her body lightly. She dresses the way I imagine people do on yachts — her mouth as she passed was a compressed vermillion diamond. I can hear how she would say hello, with a dying fall and commiserative expression, much looking down, downcast eyes. Her eyes would rise and fall like sparkling waves.

Ducky’s models rattle together like the contents of an umbrella stand and swing their long hair. I follow her out the door into peachflesh flames and creamy webs of blue fire with golden tips.

His planchette unaccountably begins to move, he sees the bridge’s graceful arch is of interlocking metal beams... Very little commerce in the City of Sex, which is all shining steel and glass like the Crystal Pavilion, and situated exactly under this city, in the hollow earth. Those galleries there are lined with private homes, and business is often conducted in living rooms and kitchens. The natives come in two basic varieties, the tall dark-skinned Day People of the long gestures wafting hands and slow willowy grace, and the rubbery semi-aquatic Night People pale as flounders with bodies like translucent rubber. Here she is on the beach filling out a crossword puzzle with wry sadness, her mouth twisted to one side. She brushes one of his nerves from her face like a lock of hair. With one stroke of his hand he smooths her white summer dress away and sun bounces from honey skin. The northern lights tenderly part their veils to me and I sink beneath her skirts, a pink-tipped violet flame curls up her milky leg.

*

Staring at the clouds until they turn pink with my eyes’ blood: indigo shadows and pink crusts, a familiar, always new landscape, a sort of homeland. I know that is where I am going or someplace like. Clouds are mesas and rafts, icebergs, a great plume spreading out like volcanic smoke... The shadows are blue, and the land beneath — mountains and sphinxes...

Two hawks fly near me: nearly motionless in the sluicing wind, they hold their places with jerks and flows and adjustments, seesaw describing invisible U’s in the air. A gaze is emitted from them. Wire spokes flash in my eyes, I see wheelchairs.

*

Young woman talking to her friend outside the cafe, they’ve just come out, finished dinner saying goodbye. Pleasing bright features, creamy blonde. A spontaneous performer, every moment of the narration she is giving (that I can’t hear) she illustrates with a vivacious gesture. Warm attentive face, listens to her friend’s story with rapid nods, little frowns and grins as she eagerly sympathizes. What generosity! Luminous eyes (they really are!) whose light spills out and over the curved tops of her cheeks, a surprisingly unexaggerated smile. Twice she flings out her arms to clasp her friend warmly, all unabashed. Nothing comes from her without a flourish. Compact, warmly effusive, generous. At least from a distance — through glass. But even from here, I can’t take my eyes from her; she has me, and though I stay hunkered down where I am, by the dumpster, I go with her, like the flu. Take me with you, my heart wails, and she takes me along as heedless of me as an updraft is of the newspaper it carries soaring into the air.

She unfolds into a huge creamy blonde world. I am breaking into the old weather station in the park. Formerly the guest house of an estate that had passed to the parks department, the station is a two-story Victorian gingerbread, sealed like a mummy in rubbery institutional paint. Soft warm night, with air like fine sand.

There is an empty corner room on the ground floor, with dead leaves in the corners. He kneels on bare boards, carefully places his notebook closed on the floor in front of him, and draws his grease pencil ring around himself. A draft stirs the leaves. He recites the “universal monochord” and thick sewage flows out from beneath his coat, its circle, brown and black, spreads uniformly and stops at the grease boundary. In his mind already he sees the downy breast of her dream, an incandescent fog of caressing pink and gold light: the elegant summer dusk, the cordial house, the family.

Here she is, her syrupy hair sheds a heated little glow over her face, her fluffy white body. Her lover, a blonde dream-boy dressed for the moment in a powder-blue prom outfit, is just offstage, shuffling his feet. He’s waiting nervously to be introduced to the parents, hefts the bouquet, clears his throat and checks his breath in cupped hand. In the weather station, I drop forward in the circle, head down, and thrust out my hands. These appear behind young Lochinvar, reach slowly out for him, then whisk! He is yanked backwards into the shadows. A frenzied cascade of arms and legs. The dream-boy flops about in wild convulsions, stuttering and grabbing at his face. His eyes sink into the sockets, his eyelids sag inwards, gape open on an inner abyss into which his eyes are tumbling. In the front room of the abandoned weather station, there I rock back and forth; my arms behind him, I lean back, and my eyes disappear into my head. My face gleams mother-of-pearl. My notebook rises in the air, flips open with a pop, and dream-boy’s eyes appear on its pages, staring incredulously into each other with a moral expression of helpless terror. Meanwhile, my eyes are in her dream.

A desperate struggle ensues: dream boy’s eye sockets bulge out grotesquely as his face wrestles with my eyes. The whites glimmer between the shuddering lashes, and now his lids are forced apart — wildly misaligned livid eyes fairly exploding from between them. Dream boy’s feeble will subsides. The Great Lover awkwardly raises his body from the floor, doggedly adjusting the necktie as the legs kick out, give way, stick straight out again.

She is waiting, beginning to get impatient. His cue still hangs unheeded in the air. The dream lists uneasily, but the Great Lover’s nerve-projection is firming up swiftly. Now the rosy-cheeked young man strides onstage leading with his forehead, louring up through his eyebrows, dragging the bouquet on the floor behind him — walk like the boy! Suddenly he straightens up with a winning grin and comes on stepping high, quick offer of the flowers.

The dream settles again, she beautifully returns his smile. He pulls his blazer around to hide the huge satyr-play erection bulging down his pant leg to the knee. Turns his head to cough into his fist, clandestinely yanks his tongue and the erection retracts. This is her father in his cardigan and her mother in hers... her pimply brother who assembles model airplanes in his spare time... how do you do?... the cousins... the minister. The smiles the extended hands the welcoming sounds the melting walls and ceilings, the extended leisurely dinner dissolving with exquisite slowness finally to the primeval bedroom beneath the rafters... sinking for a long time into her gossamer bed and slow-warming body. In my circle I bend forwards and backwards, swinging my face up to the ceiling and down to the floor emitting barks and growls through lips crisp hard and shimmering every hue, like mother of pearl streaked now with tan bile while, in her dream, her lover’s body arches over her and then descends like a pallid sail.