Cornelius Sky

by Timothy Brandoff

  "My rook. And my bishop."

  "What's that?"

  "A bowl of hashish. Your Zippo needs more lighter fluid."

  "Nah, it's the flint gone bad."

  * * *

  He rolled onto his back and through the window's upper-left pane saw a patch of blue with hints of pink in the northwestern sky of Manhattan.

  "Who's there?"

  "Did I wake you?" David said from the hall.

  "No—I mean . . . yes," Connie said, thick with sleep.

  "One flight up," David said, "number seven."

  Connie's extended nap brought access to a simple appreciation for this stopgap roof over his head. He went into the shared bathroom on the floor. He knew Susan had a connection to it. It smelled feminine. The shower curtain displayed frogs on rocks, big toothy grins on their froggy-but-also-human faces. He went up the off-kilter staircase through a wispy cloud of Lysol and knocked on seven.

  "Get some shut-eye?"

  "Like a baby."

  David sat with a man about fifty years old.

  "This is Justin, he's in the room next door."

  Justin wore a corduroy blazer and khakis, and looked the part of a disheveled intellect. Connie's first thought about him was, He's flattering us with his presence, but then the way Justin tapped his cigarette at the ashtray suggested a genuine kindness.

  "Sit."

  Connie sat next to David on the bed, with Justin facing them in the room's chair: a hub of six knees knocking.

  "Cozy," he said.

  "That it is, that it is," David said. "What can you do? We're a close-knit family. We've all come down a peg."

  "Or two," Justin said.

  Connie lit up and they sat there smoking. David jarred the window as open as the layered coats of paint permitted.

  "Connie moved in this morning. He's a doorman."

  "Welcome," Justin said.

  "Thank you. How long you been here?"

  "Thanksgiving," Justin said.

  "And what about yourself?" Connie said to David.

  "Christmas."

  "Holidays are a time of change," Justin said.

  "Shit goes down come the holidays," David said.

  "Lives collapse, families dissolve before perfectly cooked hams and turkeys," Justin said.

  "What about me?" Connie said. "I need a holiday to mark my move into Mrs. Cook's rooming house, which, by the way, did I thank you, David, sufficiently?"

  "No, you did not."

  "Sunday is Mother's Day," Justin said.

  "Fuck Mother's Day," Connie said.

  "Said the bishop to the queen," Justin said, pursing his lips slightly.

  "Does Mrs. Cook have children?" David wondered.

  "She set out a tray of Pepperidge Farm cookies on my behalf," Connie said.

  "Something out of Tennessee Williams," Justin said.

  "Susan likes the theater," David said.

  "Wait now," Connie said. "Hold on a second."

  "She's on your floor," Justin said, "room five."

  "Right below me," David said. "I wish we had a woman on our floor."

  "She complimented my socks," Connie said.

  "I leave the bathroom as I find it," Justin said.

  "She's a beauty," Connie said.

  "She has her charms," David said. "A beauty she's not."

  "She's my beauty. Tell me about her in great detail."

  Susan worked as a proofreader and copy editor through a temp agency Justin had referred her to. She smoked Sherman cigarettes, the sweet brown filterless ones. Her people were from Oklahoma but she grew up outside DC. She had two older brothers, one of whom ran a small hotel in Florida. The other, a professor, lived with his family in the high desert east of San Diego. Every once in a while a mouthwatering aroma escaped her door. A miracle, they concurred, to produce such gastronomical wonders on a rooming house hot plate. David said Susan moved in on the Fourth of July and they laughed.

  "Has she had, our Susan, any gentlemen callers?" Justin asked.

  "None that I'm aware of," David said.

  "Does she like men," Justin said, "or does she hate men?"

  "That she was quite interested in me I can state without equivocation," David said.

  A short bark of astonishment escaped Connie.

  "I could have had her," David said, "no question, but I'm taking a year off."

  "A year off?" Connie said.

  "Not getting involved with anyone for a year."

  "I don't know what the hell you're talking about," Connie said. "I'm not taking any time off. She paid me an unsolicited compliment on my argyle socks, from which I envision a lovemaking session in our very near future."

  "Forgive me, I say it to spare you, but the woman liked your socks."

  "Exactly," Connie said. "A woman doesn't say things like I like your socks for no reason. Ah, David," Connie said, "you'll learn," and they laughed some more.

  To a barely audible knock David said, "Come in, Mrs. Cook."

  Connie reached for the knob. The old lady held a small stack of folded laundry in her arms.

  "Thank you, Mrs. Cook. What do I owe you?"

  "Seventy-five cents. I ran out of fabric softener, so I deducted a quarter."

  "They feel plenty soft," David said, and placed the clothes on top of the dresser.

  Connie followed Mrs. Cook downstairs for linen. He returned to his room and made his bed before dumping the contents of the Hefty bag onto it. Next to a small sink, a hot plate sat atop a half-pint fridge. Connie emptied his pockets—money, wallet, smokes, change, keys—into the chipped six-inch skillet on the plate. The room's furnishings suggested a deeply ingrained futility in the late-afternoon light, like pieces in a museum honoring the history of sad people. He started to undress, hanging his uniform and other clothes in the closet. Maureen had tossed his favorite items into the bag, things she knew he preferred, more evidence of a still-caring touch, which Connie took as a hopeful sign for the survival of their marriage.

  For Connie, a hot shower with strong water pressure described a key amenity of heaven. He stood in the tub and let it burn down on him. He scoured his body with a soapy washcloth, performing the whole shebang of personal care and hygiene. He let his toiletry products mingle with the toiletry products of, he felt sure, Susan, there on the shower's convenient chest-high window ledge. It crossed his mind to masturbate but he didn't want to indiscriminately discard his chi like that. There's a place in the world for a good jerk, but a steady diet of it gets played out. Besides, he wanted to save himself for Susan, bring the entire catalog of his lust, the full brunt of his desire, directly to her this very night. I'll ravish her in a way she has never been ravished before, he thought, not without a fair amount of sexual self-importance. Now that they shared the same bathroom he felt an intimacy had established itself, and that in some essential way he already practically possessed her, their carnal connection a done deal. These were his thoughts, relayed from self to self, when he nicked himself, and a spot of red appeared at his jaw and brought him back to where he stood, naked before the bathroom mirror, the cap of his small circumcised dick at rest against the chilly porcelain rim of the sink basin. He chuckled at the nature of his own fantastical mind and continued to shave.

  * * *

  He waited outside the rooming house in his favorite button-down sweater, leaning against the fin of a car in a holdover pose from teenage times, smoking. People headed home up and down the block. New York bloomed through its filth and decay and somewhere in the city Andy Warhol was saying yes to money.

  He waited not ten minutes. Something in him knew she would appear. He believed he summoned her, evoked her presence, and here she came, carrying a bag of groceries from International Supermarket, offering a smile.

  "I knew I'd see you," Connie said.

  "Did you?" Susan said.

  "Like what they call a karma thing, maybe, synchronicity or something. I said, She's going to show any second."

  "Funny, my s
chedule's off today."

  "I wanted to ask you something," Connie said.

  "Yes?"

  "Would you like to take a walk downtown and have dinner tonight . . . Can I buy you dinner?"

  "Tonight?"

  "If it's okay with you."

  A moment's silence, as if someone, somewhere, was counting to three.

  "That would be nice," Susan said.

  "Beautiful."

  "Can you give me a few minutes?"

  * * *

  She came down in a dress, a casual one, swapping out her sneakers for a pair of sandals. Also, she had applied a little makeup around the eyes, and some lipstick.

  "You look terrific."

  "Thank you," she said, and what was nice, it seemed to Connie, was her sincerity. She appreciated the compliment, and with it he knew they might very well sleep together if he could manage not to sabotage the situation.

  They walked down Ninth Avenue and Connie touched her, a brief hand at the wrist to switch positions on the sidewalk. He wanted to walk closest to the street, in the event a truck jumped the curb, in which case he could push Susan to safety and die a heroic death. When he touched her, Susan didn't flinch, and what Connie truly thought was, I'm in.

  "You smell good," he said.

  "Thank you."

  "Thank you for going out with me."

  "Thank you for inviting me."

  "All right, enough!" Connie cried out, startling passersby, and Susan laughed a good one from her belly. "No more thank yous," he said. "Enough with the heartfelt appreciation. All this predictable well-mannered nonsense. Thank you this, thank you that. If I hear one more, one more thank you . . ." Connie held her for a moment in the palm of his hand. "Seriously though," he said.

  Susan, with coy trepidation, said: "Yes?"

  "Do you like how I walk, by the way, how I take each step in stride?" He made a grand sweeping gesture with his arm as they headed south together.

  "Yes," Susan said, "you're quite accomplished."

  The talk was small, subservient to the walk. Susan was working on a book project for McGraw-Hill about woodworking—a snooze, but hey, it paid the rent. Connie flew over his personal circumstances without emotion, spoke of his kids and troubled marriage, saying that although he had just separated, things had been rocky for ages, and he tied the subject up with a whattayagonnado shrug of the shoulders.

  "Would you like to take a look at the river?"

  They walked beneath the abandoned West Side Highway and found an abandoned pier, it being a time of great abandonment. The scene had tetanus shot written all over it. Connie extended his hand to help Susan negotiate the broken bottles, nails, and uneven planks. She reached for him, her palm just a little moist with nerves—not clammy, not some clinical disorder like what they said Connie's father had before he turned on the oven. The note written on the back of a letter from Bellevue. As a nine-year-old the irony was not lost on Connie, to write your suicide note on the back of a notice from Bellevue confirming your appointment as regards your nervous disorder.

  They stood at the pier's end, the river serene if you didn't look straight down into the water where terrible filth floated, nasty man-made pollution banging up against itself, trying to get away from itself. The poor Hudson.

  "This is nice," Susan said, good sport.

  "Have you been to Hoboken?"

  "No."

  "We should go one day, take the tubes, get some steamers at the Clamhouse. Do you like seafood?"

  "I can't think of any food I don't much like."

  He studied her profile as she studied the water. By no means overweight, nor was she frail. She had good height for a woman, not small-boned but well-proportioned, and something vaguely tragic about her look as well. Connie couldn't put a finger on it, yet he was drawn to her because like attracts like, they say. The space between her nose and mouth turned him on. A woman like this, in a rooming house: how sad is that?

  They walked south and east, cutting through the Village.

  "I prefer 4th to Bleecker for some reason," Connie said, but the for some reason part was disingenuous: he got his ass kicked badly on Bleecker Street when he was nineteen. Some kid attacked him, sly-rapped him dead in his face, a blunt object to the bridge of his nose, blinding him. Connie swung a few times in pathetic defense, listening to vicious laughter. He tried to flee onto Carmine Street, stumbled in the black snow on the steps to Our Lady of Pompeii, while the kid continued to kick and punch. A performance for his peers, Connie figured. The beating itself nothing in light of the emotional aftereffects, a result of the attack's randomness, the entropic nature of the violence forever altering his take on the world below the level of consciousness. The mob's laughter. Did the guy say, Watch this, before striking the first blow, or did Connie layer the line in during countless mental replays? He limped around like an old raccoon with two severely blackened eyes for a month, his olfactory connection to the world permanently dampened, one more loss he had yet to mourn.

  They decided on Chinatown. They saw a place on the Bowery with a photograph of Muhammad Ali taped in a slapdash fashion to its window and entered on a lark.

  Connie used a fork, Susan chopsticks. She ate without pretension, nothing birdlike about it, and Connie knew she was good in bed. They drank tea and Coca-Cola, ate soup and dumplings and noodles, a chicken dish and a pork dish with sautéed vegetables. They could see the blinking lights of the Manhattan Bridge from their table. They smoked and watched the waiters work. One very tall waiter towered over his comrades, holding plates of food high above his head, letting them swoop down onto tables. Customers applauded him, and Connie spotted another waiter in the shadows grimacing with universal envy.

  They hailed a Checker cab and Connie asked the driver if he could take the FDR.

  "A lot of river tonight," Susan said.

  They turned and took in the sight of the bridges receding out the rear window.

  "Thank you," Susan said, and she offered him a soft kiss on the lips.

  Connie unfolded the jump seat facing her and hopped onto it. He pulled her gently by the legs toward him, and they started to make out.

  Connie followed her up the rooming house staircase.

  "There's a bottle in my room."

  "Get it," she said.

  Susan produced two glasses on a table and placed them in front of Connie. She kissed him and quietly left. To use the bathroom, Connie thought. That visit women often make before sex. He hummed with anticipation, poured some bourbon. He glanced out the window, into the backyards, saw a dilapidated bicycle built for two chained to a fence.

  Susan returned, gently closed the door. She sat next to Connie on the bed and he offered her a drink.

  He looked at her, and he didn't know why, but his eyes got glassy. He took a swallow of booze and said, "Who are you?"

  "Who am I?"

  "Proofreader . . . small college in Vermont . . . good with a hot plate, so they say. Two brothers . . . father something called an economist . . . mother a librarian."

  "Are you getting philosophical with me?" Susan said.

  A vacuum of silence suddenly filled the space.

  "Quiet in the back," he said.

  He reached for her. They adjusted their bodies on the bed, the better to kiss. He took her jaw in hand and lined her face up to appropriate the full benefit of her mouth. She reached for his dick, found it, and made a noise as he continued to kiss her. He broke from her, got up, and took his pants off.

  "I need to unrestrict my balls," he said.

  Susan laughed and reached to shut off the lamp. The room lit now by dirty moonlight.

  "Can people hear?" he whispered.

  "Who cares?" She stood up, shook her sandals off, let the dress fall from her body. Connie kissed her stomach, held her by the back of her thighs.

  "Something about you," he said. He sat on the room's chair. "Straddle me, would you?" And she did. "You're so light. The weight of you."

  "Am I?"

/>   He started to kiss her nipples, first with some dry, getting-acquainted kisses, simple and slow, before folding in some tongue and saliva.

  "Are they sensitive?"

  "Yes," she said earnestly. She made little sex noises which were genuine, and her breath caught, as Connie continued to kiss and suck.

  He had been with women who felt compelled to act turned on when Connie sensed they were not turned on, and it threw him. He himself liked sex quite a bit, when not completely shame-scalded by it. He'd been on the make his whole life. Others, it seemed, were more successful in transmuting their sex drive, going on to achieve a full platter of accomplishments: careers, country homes, pilot licenses, PTA participation, qualifying for Olympic teams, you name it. There was so much to tackle, so much to learn, and be, and do, when you weren't looking to get laid round the clock. Connie's lifelong sexuality had carried with it a sorrowful burden, and the tyranny of compulsion as well.

  Oddly, given its obsessive prominence in his life, he had never made a serious study of it. It essentially remained a mystery to him, a woman's vagina, which was maybe part of its appeal. He did his best to help women come, he took natural pleasure in it, he loved the taste and smell of pussy, it turned him on to watch a woman's face when she came, yet the whole business simultaneously made him uptight.

  He himself only came once as a rule, during what he assumed would be quantified as a stand-alone lovemaking session. Growing up, shooting the shit with the fellas over a game of pool, or anywhere else guys who bragged about how many times they came during a described blow-by-blow fuck-fest congregated, he personally never understood coming more than once. After he came once he was done, he had no interest in coming twice. The French had a phrase for what he felt after his lonely little orgasm. And since he knew he was done once he came once, he felt beholden to his partner that she come before he come, if she were going to come at all. Soon after penetration there arrived a moment, generally within those first eighteen or twenty seconds, when he had to stay mindful. Wait, wait a minute now, he'd say, hold tight, and he did something he learned as a kid: he thought about his dead aunt Loretta, who represented in Connie's mind all things unhorny, unsexy, and anticlimactic, the vision of Aunt Loretta serving to distract the blood-rush to his dick for the necessary split-second in which he might manage to circumvent the onslaught of orgasm. He would lie on top of his partner, stock-still in the eye of a premature ejaculatory storm, until the threat moved on. After which he could resume for what he thought would be considered a decent stretch.