Sweet Desserts

by Lucy Ellmann

  I slid the glass door to the side, put my hand on his wet, warm chest, and kissed him. He held my head to his. I stepped into the shower, still wearing my East Side interviewing garb: I had to put my legs around him.

  The water got too hot. He turned it down. I felt it running all over me and changing temperature, as he dragged my sticky clothes off me. Before, behind, between, above, below.

  Two figures lit by a little light, six hours difference, now far back in the past. My America. I begged him to fuck me and fuck me and fuck me, and as he did so later on the bed, he said that he was made for me, which I considered corny, but true.

  Sacrum

  Ileum

  Ischium

  Pubis

  ASSEMBLE WITH FOUR LONG SCREWS

  FIX BOTTOM AND MIDDLE FITTINGS

  TO LEGS ON THE OPEN SIDE

  With Jim’s help, I got a little farther with the New Wave, about which he had his reservations: ‘It’s like a lot of bored Central Park Plaza brats that want to get into the Bad, when we’re here struggling like hell to get rid of it. We don’t find any romance in junk. And when they move in, we can’t afford to live here anymore. It’s all part of the Redevelopment program.’ I stopped going out and just taped Jim.

  But always the trip to Vermont loomed. Franny was getting impatient – I was supposed to be helping her pack and here I was, fucking around in New York. On my last possible night, Jim took me to The Barber of Seville, his favorite opera. I found it tender, and cried. It seemed to be about imprisonment.

  I said I’d take him out for Japanese food afterwards, but first we went for a drink at an artsy bar where we met an old geezer who seemed to be an artist, gay, and interested in Jim. They talked and talked. I drank Manhattans. I tried at first to participate but the other guy ignored me. Jim seemed enthralled by him. In the end, he invited the guy to come eat Japanese food with us. I was amazed – was I supposed to pay for this guy to hog sushi and Jim all evening?

  I could hardly bring myself to speak when we parted from the creep, who didn’t even want to come anyway. I was so angry, speechless with rage. When we got to the restaurant, Jim asked me if I was annoyed with him, and urged me to spit it out if I was. I finally admitted I was and he got all excited! He was very pleased. He said I’d been treating him so nicely all the time, he hadn’t known what to make of it, but now he knew he loved me. I had a feeling this decision was somewhat influenced by the dress I was wearing, a clingy black number, but I too felt strangely energized by this near breakdown of relations. We stared lustfully at each other over raised wooden platforms of raw fish until the restaurant presented us each with a Japanese mug – it was their third anniversary – and sent us home.

  Jim lay across my legs that night, now and then looking into my eyes as he mashed his face into my cunt. He decided to come with me to Vermont. I instantly began to fear that Franny would either dislike him, or somehow manage to take him from me. He told me nothing bad would happen.

  We rented a car the next day and headed North, stopping whenever caresses became urgent.

  Outline

  I Beginning

  A Main characters

  1 Melanie

  2 Lynn

  3 Patty

  4 Bus-driver

  5 Mrs Turpin

  6 Me

  B Setting

  1 Time: 2.30, Tuesday, February

  2 Place: highway in Chicago, Ill.

  C Situation: a bus accident

  II Middle: Events – concert, Horse game, bus

  turning, going over snow …

  III End

  A Final event: bumping into tree

  B Summary statement: results – Lynn’s broken

  leg, bus-driver’s cut, my scratches,

  Melanie’s dizziness, Patty’s O.K.ness

  Franny and I started arguing as soon as I arrived. According to her, Jim and I were three hours late. According to my calculations, we were only about an hour and a half late. She said it didn’t matter, she’d just been worried about us. She took a look at Jim and raised her eyebrows at me in an appreciative manner. She became rather flirtatious, in fact. We went out to supper at a fancy place where the wait-person had to recite a pretentious menu she’d learnt by heart: it’s supposed to be an added luxury for the customer not to have to learn how to read. We made her repeat a lot of it.

  Franny gave up her bed to us that night. I had a shower and caught Franny’s eye on the way back from the bathroom. She whispered, ‘He’s nice! But I don’t think he likes me.’ Then she told me that John had been treating her badly: he had another girlfriend in England he was going back to.

  I retreated to Franny’s bedroom feeling guilty about having my nice man waiting for me in there. Jim was sitting on the floor, reading a newspaper. What will future cultural historians think when they find out how much of everyone’s time in the twentieth century was spent on newspaper perusal? To spare them a little bewilderment, I put a bare clean leg over Jim’s shoulder and sank myself down on him like a Borneo woman making a pass. He pulled me down onto the floor then, keeping my legs open with his arm.

  The next day, after bagels for breakfast (Franny’s favorite) and orange juice (ditto), we began packing the car and arguing. Franny’s computer inside its padding inside its box inside its case inside its cardboard box underneath a blanket couldn’t have anything put on top of it, not even a clothes-hanger. Four large suitcases, a radio, a box of books, a large shaggy lampshade with protruding wires and the computer accessories all had to be squidged in elsewhere, meaning that we didn’t even have room to take Jim as far as the train station. He took a taxi.

  We smoked a last joint together.

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ I said. ‘Immensely.’

  ‘You shouldn’t miss me immensely – you should be having a swinging social life. Hey, but write to me. I love you.’ It reminded me of similarly hopeless statements, made under similar pressure from the Atlantic, sixteen years earlier. He urged autonomy on me, when I hadn’t yet satisfied the pubescent longing to unbutton and reveal all those soft sad corners. I felt around for my shell as I watched him go, and climbed back into it.

  Leaving behind forever the beautiful miniature piano Franny had bought for Lily (it didn’t fit in the car), two grumpy women set off on the long haul to Boston’s Logan airport. We argued about the choice of route: the ridiculousness of mine, the nonexistence of Franny’s. We argued about Franny’s directions: whether she’d given them, whether I’d misheard them. We headed off in the direction of Nova Scotia.

  The rest of the time we argued about personal, sexual and emotional matters. To rid myself of a vivid image of cutting Franny up into thick slices that looked like white bread, I turned my thoughts to the sex of the previous night (it works well in the dentist’s chair too). As if sensing my mental desertion of the car scene, Franny suddenly said, ‘Not very bright, is he?’

  I hoped she didn’t mean Jim. ‘Who you talking about?’

  ‘Jim! Who’d you think? Terribly chauvinistic too. Must be the Italian in him. How do you find people like that, Suzy?’ she enquired.

  ‘I thought you liked him!’

  ‘I did, until all that stuff at the restaurant about waitresses.’

  I wasn’t sure what the hell she meant, all I knew was she’d wrecked it for me.

  I dumped Franny and her belongings at the TWA check-in desk and drove several times around Logan airport looking for the right place to return the car. Then I waited in a long line and when I finally got to the front of it, had to pay extra money. But the Hertz wait, though itself distressing, spared me any more of Franny’s company until the last minute before we had to go to the passenger lounge, at which point I spent a good deal of time in the loo, feeling out a new continent of despair.

  Though she’d expressed doubts about returning to England, Franny seemed elated on the plane, and drank champagne. I nursed a cut I’d gotten from her lampshade.

  Keep your wound as clean and dry as
possible.

  At Heathrow, we rented yet another car that was too small. This time Franny drove, terrifyingly carefully (she’d just learned how). She frowned when I snagged her lampshade on the car-door getting it out, but once I’d carried all her possessions into her flat, and sat around while she sorted some of them out, she took me to a Greek restaurant where people broke a lot of plates on purpose and danced in a long silly line around our table.

  ‘Strike flat the thick rotundity

  of the world!’

  Found Objects

  Another individual term. Suzy doesn’t participate in the life of the school at all.

  It was very nice to see Lily again. I’d missed her. Immensely. Her little hands were dear to hold. She drew pictures of smiling butterflies and said, ‘Suzy, do you hope. I’m happy?’

  I said, ‘Yes. Are you?’

  ‘Yes. I’m happy like these butterflies.’

  I resumed my jaunts to the laundromat, Jeremy having removed his washing-machine in a moving-van. Meanwhile, the ill-informed Irving continued to forward all of Jeremy’s junk mail to my house.

  Daddy came up to London to see me settled again. He asked if he could see my thesis too, so I had to give him a thirty-page essay I’d done some time before – a collage of different interpretations of collage. He was astounded by the messiness of my house. Jeremy had made no attempt to clean it up before he left (taking care of Lily was as much as I could ask of him), while I had been busy on the East Side article since my return, and had made no headway as yet with the many junk-rooms Jeremy had created.

  ‘On a recent trip to New York, I decided to check out the newly rich East Village, where eighty new galleries have opened up within the last five years, selling the semi-subversive found objects of the latest found artists.’

  I could not bring myself to write to Jim. He phoned and I said everything was all right, but in fact my mind had become preoccupied with the notion that I might have caught AIDS from him – I’d decided he was bisexual. Franny meanwhile re-established amorous relations with John.

  I sit looking at my typewriter and out of the window through the crack in the curtain I’ve allowed myself, and think about the guy on the French train. He claimed he was a policeman. He’d been on a case in Cannes, where his main discovery seemed to have been that tomatoes were overpriced. I’d been in Nice looking at Matisse in connection with my MA at the Courtauld. I had to talk to him for hours in my shaky French. I went to the loo while the couchetteman was making up our beds. As I brushed my teeth, I decided that it would be all right if the policeman made a pass, it might even be interesting. The door to our compartment was locked when I got back – an excuse, it seemed, for him to lock it again after I came in. I hauled myself onto the top bunk. The policeman explained to me the mechanics of my reading-light, and then got into the bunk below. I read happily enough for a few minutes, before he stood up and declared he wanted to kiss me (vb. embracer).

  ‘Vraiment?’ was my suave reply.

  The guy was passionate, with a big tongue and a big prick which he soon rammed into me. On that top bunk he made me come. People hammered on the door to be allowed to go to bed.

  Dismal metro journey together the next day. I didn’t want to spoil the encounter by repeating it, so I duly informed him that there was un autr’homme. Dismal solitude of my dismal hotel room. Dismal autr’homme.

  I suddenly realize that I am extremely sick of seeing the perfectly formed ballerina every time I go to the loo, and of being reminded what kind of whisky she drinks after a night spent tripping across the boards, or whatever they do. I turn the magazine over as I sit down on the loo, and find inside a review by someone I once remotely fancied. Waves of abdominal pain course through me as I read his deliberations on Hiroshima, deliberately full of alliterative p’s.

  ‘This is shit!’ I exclaim.

  I eventually return to my desk and locate the apples – red American ones, which I was embarrassed to buy for fear of seeming patriotic. They look better than they taste. It occurs to me that if I take Lily to school and then go to the DHSS office and receive my numbered ticket in the queue, I could then go to the VD clinic and have my pre-AIDS-test-counselling and my AIDS test and my AIDS-test-debriefing, and probably be back in the DHSS office before my number is called, so that with any luck both errands could be accomplished within Lily’s six-hour school-day.

  I’ve attempted to avoid work all day. I now tidy my desk, my books, and my records (I manage to refrain from arranging my ten cassette-tapes in alphabetical order as well – I only play Rossini these days anyway), I load the new washing-machine Daddy bought me when he saw my plight, with whites, I make tea, I check the TV programs for the coming week, I rearrange the papers on my desk and then sit down at it to write: etcetera, etcetera, all the way down the page, sometimes including 8’s and 9’s, in an attempt at a shapely sideways mountain-range. I watch this sheet of paper float to the floor as I grab another on which to draw an iris that soon turns into an infinite pile of bananas. I trim my fingernails. I eat crackers. I hoover up the debris from both activities, and then veer out of the room and hoover the stairs. I stare at the African bark painting above my desk for some minutes, and then have a bath – I need one.

  1

  22

  333

  4444

  55555

  666666

  7777777

  666666

  55555

  4444

  333

  22

  1

  I dry my hair with the blow-dryer, and administer rouge to my cheeks in the manner prescribed by a make-up salesgirl at Boots five years ago (after I gave up my boycott of the whole Boots chain). The time nears for my release from work. I put Figaro on again.

  ’Tutu mi chiedono.

  Tutti mi vogliono.

  Donne, ragazzi,

  Vecchi, fanciulle.’

  Daddy returned my essay to me with so many corrections all over it that I couldn’t bring myself to look at it, except for the bits where he’d written, ‘good’. I didn’t want to look at Daddy either – he didn’t seem very well.

  It was the year they took the statue of Eros out of Piccadilly, to make room for more cars.

  … besides the instinct to preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units, there must exist another contrary instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primaeval, inorganic state …

  Such bullshit. Death is the least natural thing in the world, the opposite of nature.

  I was cold, so I had a cup of tea. Then I was too hot. I suddenly felt ready to write to British Telecom.

  Dear Sir or Madam,

  It may, or of course it may not, interest you to know that my telephone has been on the blink for two weeks. During this period I have had recourse to the public telephones in my area, which are also on the blink. I have been passed around amongst BT employees to little avail. On Monday morning I spoke to an insolent young man. I didn’t dare call again on Tuesday, for fear of annoying him, but was relieved on Wednesday to get hold of an apparently different man. He was unfortunately unable to tell me anything but that the engineers had reportedly fixed my phone on Tuesday.

  I took this opportunity to declare that my telephonic apparatus was nonetheless not functioning, and that I needed it to function. He said he’d give my telephone priority. On Thursday, I got a woman who refused to give it priority. On Friday, the insolent guy was back, pretending to be the nice guy. Detecting the necessary note of distress in my voice, he suggested I call Customer Services. Customer Services provided a sympathetic personage who commiserated but could only promise to beg on my behalf, which did not sound promising. Nonetheless, I fell deeply in love. To this man, I was at last able to confide in full my urgent need for a telephone (see below). Though it was clear from his pleasant tone that the gentleman could have no power within the company, I felt somewhat better after this exchange.

  Perhaps I sho
uld explain. I have recently spent a great deal of time and money replying to personal ads and was expecting to hear from people this week. I (irrationally, I know) regard my telephone’s utter silence as a massive rejection of my epistolary advances (photos included), and have taken to drink as a result, nevermind the cookies. Being forlorn is quite expensive on my meager income (am I still renting my defunct telephone all this time, by the by?).

  When I rang British Telecom today, the right tone of voice was once again detected, thus qualifying me for another referral to Customer Services. The Servant I then spoke to offered me something I now recognize as really special: the number of someone with a name! A name, o! frabjous day kaloo kalay. ‘Mrs Kennedy’ – I shall treasure it, it’s branded on my heart in a mass of microscopic colored wires, yes, YES! I was told to speak to Mrs Kennedy.

  I imagine her as a strong, maternal type, able to battle her full-bosomed way through red tape, red hands, in fact any birthing difficulty telephone technicians or clients may be caught encountering. Hired like Aunt Jemima, to give the operation a bit of class and keep us suckers busy while some External Engineer is stubbing his cig out on the crucial wire connecting one’s home with the outside world. I have a weakness for maternal substitutes, possibly explained by certain aspects of my upbringing, several aspects in fact, come to think of it, so I was rather looking forward to calling up your Mrs Kennedy for a little chat, but thought I should wait a bit, save it up for later: I’d been talking to BT all morning as it was.

  I went straight home therefore and got the squids out of the fridge. I wrestled with their horny assholes and globular eyes and sacs of orange eggs. One had neither eggs nor liver. I steamed what seemed theoretically edible, but my neighbor called me out into the backyard during this delicate process, and it seemed necessary to peer, and expound, back at her – she has a lot of flower pots that my cat shits in, so I have to be nice. As soon as I could, I returned to the squids which were by then rubbery, except for the liverish bits, which were disintegrating.