Monsters

by Karen Brennan

  In my heart of hearts, what I wanted was music. I played the violin, holding my bow just so, elbow out, and my teacher would say watch the ceiling! because I was tall and the instruction room was tiny. My teacher was an ex-hippie and her husband was always cooking something strange when I got there—day lily pods or lentil patties. He would bustle hungrily around the kitchen humming as I tried to get through a page of music with my teacher. I liked the fact of his bustling nearby because he was very handsome. But imagine humming when someone was trying to play the violin! I crouched as I bowed, straining toward a single spectacular pitch, high E, which I was told would vibrate the dishes in the cabinets.

  I worked for an elderly man and his daughter in the upper east side. The apartment was filled with expensive paintings and “collectibles,” as my mother would say, and the refrigerator regularly stocked with sheep’s milk cheeses and beluga caviar and other gustatory pleasures such as Häagen-Dazs popsicles, which I gorged on compulsively after supper.

  I gorged on whatever I could because this was the era when the things you wanted could quickly evaporate and the air bustled hungrily like the violin teacher’s handsome husband. I gorged on bologna sandwiches, pizza, trout almondine, salmon en croute, choux pastries, Twinkies, Jolly Rogers, Junior Mints, Neccos, Alfredo sauce from the jar, you name it. Food was food, just as a person racing to catch a subway was not so different from the subway itself or even thoughts of the subway springing to mind from some anomalous time in the future.

  I gorged on the future, dreaming it up, dismissing it, then dreaming it up again. I would be this or that. I would go here or there. My mother reminded me, “Beautiful things come to those who wait.” So I waited. But it was hard in those days when nothing stood still very long. Even the billboards vanished days after being installed—a woman with a moustache of milk overtaken by an image of a telephone or a dog or a hairbrush—and the man’s apartment vibrated at odd times of day as if getting ready to take off.

  Through all this, my violin teacher remained almost preternaturally calm, as if history had given up on her: she wore the same jeans she wore in the 60s and the same hand-made leather sandals and she moved around her small apartment like a cat. I loved her for her silence and her disregard of trends, but I loved her husband more for his long girlish lashes and his beautiful lips and slow smile. There came a time when I would kiss and lick those lips and probe them open with the tip of my tongue, but I can’t tell you that part yet.

  What’s important is that I practiced the violin while, at the same time, cooking for the old man and his daughter who was, I think, a nymphomaniac. Regularly, she would go off and not return for days and when she did return she would look ragged and spent. Once the buttons of her blouse had all been ripped out leaving little holes in the fabric and she was wearing a strange smile of pleasure that I recognized.

  My teacher said, Watch your bowing, watch the position of your hand, your elbow, your eyes, yes watch where your eyes are watching. She spoke calmly, like a guru I once worshiped, and like him, she required the impossible. Dragging my bow across the strings felt like driving a bus full of screeching people over a series of potholes in the middle of the summer. Don’t worry, one out of every three adult violin players complains of the same sensation, she told me. If it weren’t for her husband, I would have quit on the spot but every once in a while he’d brush up against my hips or touch my arm very lightly on the way by with his plates of food.

  My employer the old man was really quite mentally ill, I believe. He complained of horrible diseases that threatened to blind him or make his limbs shrivel up. He’d spend hours in front of the mirror pinching pieces of his face, pulling out hairs with a tweezer like a woman. Then hours on the telephone with his doctor, then hours swallowing pills.

  I never wanted to be a maid, but I loved to cook and cooked whatever came to mind: port wine cheddar and rhubarb pizzas, risottos with trout and nuts, lamb and mangos, strawberry chutney on a bed of candied snails. And for fun, tulips with homemade mayonnaise; sirloin and chocolate, chocolate and asparagus. In between cooking I dusted the collectibles with infinite care. Little boxes with whistles attached, or figurines in the shapes of cufflinks. Once, bending to dust a thimble-sized mirror, I saw into the world of one my nostrils to a flock of performing gymnasts, swinging from parallel bars and leaping over vaults, cheering each other on in little shrieks.

  At home, my mother dusted her own collectibles which consisted of ten metal lunch boxes she’d acquired for enormous sums of money. In those precarious days we needed to believe that our pasts added up to something even though every ten years a paradigm shift occurred. The metal lunch boxes reminded my mother of her youth and how often did she tell me about the little red and black plaid one she carried off each morning with a hard-boiled egg and two cookies? How often did she mourn the passing of this or that day, like the field trip to the Empire State Building when she was in 6th grade? Looking down from the 22nd floor and feeling in her head a terrible dizziness that transformed itself to bliss. And she said that was when the strings of the world loosened, and her own strings as well, so that she floated above the city and she saw into the windows of the apartments to the people sitting with their legs up on their sofas watching TV or playing computer games. That was bliss for my mother: being able to see into people’s apartments, to the programs on their TV screens.

  My idea of bliss was very different. And the old man’s, and his daughter’s. Standing on the fire escape and shaking the lambswool duster onto the top of a bus or a person’s umbrella, the city rising like a mountain range in the background, I would frequently marvel at all the varieties of bliss there must be, one for each person in the city, making millions. And it would occur to me, still shaking the duster so that my arm was beginning to ache, that some people’s bliss would be more disagreeable than others’ which would remind me of a newspaper story about the woman’s arms that were found in the dumpster the night before. But if I closed my eyes and concentrated, the picture of the woman’s arms would gradually be replaced by the eerie music of the city, like a troop of stampeding horses, racing underneath all my ideas of it, which is when the old man’s daughter tapped me on the shoulder. “What if you fell?” she said, “Then you would have to sue us.”

  So I opened my eyes. She wore a black slip with black threads dangling from the hem and her hair was a mess. It seemed to me I hadn’t seen her for days. “I’m so tired,” she said. “Could you rub my back?” Her back was cold and sharp, like an object made of metal, but I did what I could, I went through the motions of massage, but really it was like massaging the back of a grill pan. That feels so good, she said and she moaned, but I didn’t see what could feel good about it, which proves my point about the varieties of bliss. Then her father would emerge from his room in his bathrobe and he would say to her, Naya, what are you doing dear, put on your clothes. Then she would unfold herself from the floor, creaking like an old rusty hinge, and she would scuttle back to her room to read her pornographic magazines.

  I didn’t mind the man and his daughter. They were a little different, as my mother would say, but my mother was conventional. She jogged and lifted weights; she kept a dream journal; she collected lunch boxes. Who didn’t know hundreds like her? Dashing to catch a train or simmering on an escalator, who didn’t have their cell phones out, who hadn’t checked with their astrologers, who hadn’t had liposuction?

  Against the conventions of the day, maybe even in spite of them, I was getting better at bowing, making daily improvements. The sound was smoother, not like a bus chugging and sputtering up Fifth Avenue, but like the inside of a tunnel during rush hour—relentless, eternal. Though I was unable to reach high E, there were consolations in the way my teacher nodded and smiled her cat’s smile and in the way her husband’s flirtations had advanced. Now he would stand behind me, cupping my bottom with his hands as I bowed, and his wife seemed either not to notice or not to care. She repeated her instructions: elbow o
ut, right angle, nicely, smoothly, while he stood there looking over my shoulder at the music and whispering cunt, fucking whore in my ear.

  I’m not an historian and it’s difficult to describe the city as it was then. As a civilization we were universally aroused, universally in search of orifices or appendages. Perhaps that’s why someone lopped off the woman’s arms, as part of a performance piece demonstrating our impossible desires. Perhaps that’s why I wanted to be a saint, as part of a performance piece demonstrating my faith that beautiful things were bound to occur.

  Meanwhile, the frozen city composed the background for all our performances, like a mountain range formed by millions of years of shifting rock and evaporating oceans. At the very top of each building was apt to be someone hammering frantically on the plate glass and inside one room of every fifty, a clear-eyed, tranquil person would be plotting suicide.

  Naya, said the old man, my employer, I am so tired of hearing about basketball and baseball, I am so tired of advertisements for sneakers and instant suppers, it makes me feel sick, dear. The daughter was lounging on the sofa before dinner, clipping her toenails and sending the clippings sailing through the room where they sprinkled the carpet and wedged themselves silently among the bric-a-brac. Naya, if one of those toenails scratches a Fabergé egg I will kill you, dear, said the old man. Not if I kill you first, said the daughter with a mean chuckle.

  My point is that the old man and his daughter were churlish and I was no exception to this mood which permeated all of our beings in the year before our lives were set on their final courses. Who can explain how we were then? The movie theater screens featured close-ups of anguished faces and retrospectives which ached toward something all of us were forgetting rapidly. The subject matter of the world was bravery and failure, in conjunction, just as, in those days, the outer planets were all conjunct with each other for a time and were thought to presage catastrophic events. In a certain way, my life was conjunct with the violin teacher and her husband. Now we were bound up with each other and it seemed to me I was practicing our song without perfecting it. Even my teacher, who wore her preternatural calm like her Indian print dress, was beginning to fray around the edges. I saw it in the way she regarded me, sliding her eyes my way when she thought I wasn’t looking. The husband raised snakes upstairs and once during a short break from my lesson, I allowed him to wind one around my neck, to flick its red tongue in the vicinity of my nipple.

  My mother was the one who summed it up the best: cheap thrills. But it’s what we needed to hurdle us through to the new era. Then, as we know, things became quite elevated and more reasonable. When I was a kid I buried my gold signet ring in a hole in my backyard, but now I was grown-up and had no need for further secrecy.

  WISH

  There was the time I got stuck in a long line of cars entering a parking garage. Impatiently, I left my car (motor still on) and went for a walk. I walked around the park, under the big shade trees. The ground, that time of year, was covered with pine needles and my feet crunched along pleasantly, enjoying themselves. In the distance I observed kids in a playground, mothers with short blond pony tails, giant purses slung over their shoulders, trees, dogs, swings, rocks, grass…

  and when I returned to my car everyone was honking and screaming. Angry red-faced men were banging their fists on the hood of my car. A woman hurled groceries at my head—bag of oranges, bottle of detergent, fat roll of paper towels. Then someone pointed a gun at me. It had a rough textured handle and was quite surprisingly heavy. I knew this because I perfectly imagined its heft in my hand at which point I pulled the trigger and woke up in my own bed. Next to me, S was snoring, sound asleep. I went to his night table and removed the 1911 Colt 45 from its blue plastic case. It had a double-diamond rosewood grip, just like the gun in my dream, and it weighed about 3 pounds. Click, it went, when I pulled the trigger. I took aim through the window, at the sky and the leafy tree in front of the sky.

  LAST QUARTET

  One of us has cancer. One of us is blond. One of us is a painter. One of us is driving.

  One of us has just returned from another place. Another is in considerable pain. This one makes jokes. That one laughs loudest.

  She gazes out the window, thinks flat, thinks sky. Closes his eyes. Opens the peanut butter crackers. Puts out her hand.

  Wishes he weren’t dying and in pain. Wishes no one were dying and in pain. Narrowly misses a chair in the middle of the freeway. Says, “good steering.”

  Who is a curator? Who will have a round of chemo in three days? Who scrambles in her purse for her cell phone which is ringing and then stops ringing? Who takes off his hat because his head is sweating?

  Returning from a place where the weather had been unpredictably warm. Thinking of a man she has begun to date. Telling a joke. Buying the first round of gas.

  The surreal event of the chair on the highway, oddly upright as if someone were about to sit on it. Something derogatory about the peanut butter crackers. The entire view, his own range of vision and all that it encompasses through the plate glass windshield, reflected in his sunglasses. His knees seem to have shrunk, though this is unlikely.

  Since adolescence, has worn the blue buttoned down shirt proudly, even now, as if the former century were still in full swing. Thinks it’s quite possible the world will end in her lifetime, a sphere of fire biblically raining down upon. Requests an audio book. Requests a pee stop.

  Imagine sitting in a chair hooked up to an IV for hours, slowly absorbing cancer-killing poison. Cows craning their necks. A daring performance piece would be to sit on the freeway chair and invite oncoming traffic to avoid killing you. Birds swelling up like music.

  Every once in a while, one of us cries quietly. Having peed, another tells a joke about a man who had two sisters, one tall, one short. “Oh yeah, and they go to a bar,” says a third. The fourth is a doctor.

  A pleasant memory of waking in tangled blue sheets with her current lover. Wishing she could read her book without getting nauseous. Holding his hand for a long minute, then taking hers back. Swallowing another pain pill, waiting until the landscape blurs pleasantly, until his head buzzes with good will.

  Has grievances. Has longings. How it will be, four days with these others? Already bored.

  Hates long drives like this. Feels another should pay for gas. Doesn’t drive at all. Requests the audio book.

  Eats a pear. Offers the others a piece of cinnamon gum. Falls asleep. Takes off her shoes.

  Thinks the audio book has a familiar plot. Still believes he can feel his knees shrinking, becoming infinitesimally smaller. Inadvertently bites the inside of her mouth while chewing gum. The landscape lusher, greener, with hazy streaks of brown in the sky.

  The words since we have learned to accept the idea that art without conventional beauty, art that is rough and strange and disturbing make her feel dizzy and ill. A time when she gave a boy some baseball cards because he was shy. Tries not to blink for one hundred seconds and loses. Imagines he is driving a boat across an ocean and that all the other cars are sea monsters disguised as boats disguised as cars.

  That tall pale boy with a Dutch last name who had no friends because he was shy and foreign. Grips the edge of the seat as the car lurches forward. We could all die any second and why not? “How about if someone else drives?”

  The keeper of the snacks grabs a handful of vanilla Oreos to share. Reading You could see a lot more if you allowed your eyes to accustom themselves to the dimness. Seized with an improbable idea. Watching the sky, recalls that blue is conducive to creativity.

  Hands over a charge card. Pumps gas. Visits the rest room, no paper towels. Purchases a candy bar.

  How many more miles? Tries to sleep by resting the side of his head against the car door, daydreams. Breaks a candy bar in two and offers it around. In a certain light the road is the same non-color as the sky.

  Thoughts of dying and pain have grown very small, like that tree on the edge of that hill. Yo
u tend to forget what you are looking at is, after all, only canvas and paint. Conceives an invention wherein fuel for a car is manufactured in a hibachi attached to the hood. Removes her glasses.

  The shy foreign boy and the gift of baseball cards recollected, inexplicably. Noticing a tiny throb beginning in his left shoulder. “This audio book seems to have no plot whatsoever.” Impressing the landscape upon memory: the sequence of hills and the shape of the sky, yes the sky has a shape.

  What happens to memories when we die, do they float up? The daydream is sexual, but vague. Can’t fall asleep. The pain in his left shoulder has moved to his neck.

  If it weren’t for her mother, she would never have thought to give the boy baseball cards. If the soul exists it hovers in the railroad track between lunacy and science. I wish I weren’t so hungry all the time, then goes on to visualize a cake sprinkled with powdered sugar. She, the daydream, is elusive, even naked she is elusive.

  In a room of many voices, like a symphony. “Where are we?” “This audio book is full of clichés.” Thinking that if someone asked him right now what he was thinking he wouldn’t be able to give a truthful reply.

  His voice is eloquent and strong, resonant with emotion. As if he’d always known this would happen, this presentation of bad news, recalling the doctor in his green coat clicking the end of his ballpoint pen. The boy had been tall, way taller than the other 4th graders, thus ungainly, a bit monstrous. “Let’s play a game,” suggests one.

  Repeats to himself, a passage from the dull audio book. “In the great scheme of things we are all lucky to have lived this long.” “Nevertheless we hang on.” “I veto the game playing because I hate car games.”