by Joan Connor
When we returned in the afternoons, Molly removed her wig and fluffed out her red curls. While I napped or read inside, she sunned herself by the arbor. When my drowsy eyes fluttered open, the wig startled me. Jolted, I’d momentarily think someone was sitting there. By turns, it seemed stately like a marble bust, or ghastly like a decapitated head. I half-expected it to start speaking to me, “Jason, I have returned from the netherworld to deliver you a message.” But after an initial uneasy acquaintanceship, I habituated to the wig’s presence as one might to an eccentric aunt.
After my naps, I sat on the porch and read. From time to time, I glanced at Molly, enjoying her skin, her browning breasts and buttocks as one enjoys a piece of fruit ripening on the windowsill, a plum purpling to the perfect moment when, neither soft nor firm, it pops, punctured by patient teeth.
Some afternoons, the neighboring farmer wheeled by in his wagon, each day reining his donkey closer to Molly who, pretending not to notice him, rolled shyly onto her stomach as he passed. After a few days of cutting nearer and nearer to Molly’s modestly turned back, he reached into the wagon bed and chucked a tomato, splat, between her shoulder blades. Startled, she sat up, clutching her towel to her breasts, her red hair a snarl of light as the farmer drove on laughing and waving at me where I sat, my spread-eagled book unread on my lap. As Molly stared at the farmer’s departing back, I laughed too. I couldn’t blame the man for wanting to enjoy Molly’s nakedness as I myself had. But Molly fixed me with an expression I couldn’t read at the time—the fixed stare of a stone goddess.
The afternoon after the hurled tomato, I flagged the farmer over and by gestures offered him some of our lunch. Molly, trim in an awning striped sundress I loved, sliced tomatoes and listened while I tried to converse with the farmer. “Jason,” I pointed at myself. “Molly.” I put my arm around her and said, “Wife.” He nodded.
He spoke a bit of English, knew the professor who annually rented the farmhouse. I pointed at a small nearby island and asked, “What’s there?”
He pushed back the white shock of hair which swung over his squinted forehead. His whole face frowned, brown sun-blistered paint, as he puzzled out the meaning of my question, then smiled. “Antiparos.”
“Antiparos,” I repeated. “What’s there?”
“Island,” he said, his creased face relaxing as he found the word.
“Island,” I said, “but what’s there?”
His face ruffled again like a rain-soaked, doorstep-Globe at home.
Molly paused, tomato knife in midair. “Antiparos. Antiparos is famous for caves.”
“Caves,” the farmer repeated, his brow easing.
“Is it populated?” I asked.
The farmer’s face crinkled again.
Molly reframed the question. “Do people live there?”
“Ah,” the farmer said, his smile an over-ripened tomato slitting its skin, “little people.”
“Little people live there?” I asked.
And he nodded, dusted another tomato off on his pants leg and bit into it, the red juice squirting onto his fingers.
I’m a small man, and the idea seized me. I turned to Molly. My face must have radiated possibility. I said, “An island of little cave-dwellers, Moll,” imagining Lilliput or Munchkinland.
Molly bubbled with laughter, and the old man looked at her, perplexed.
“He means few, few people live there,” she translated.
I slapped my forehead, then started laughing. The farmer wiped his hands on his pants, stared questioningly at Molly, at me, and then threw up his hands and joined us in laughing purely for the pleasure of it.
Why on that small island in April, when the world seemed so simple, did anything imaginable seem possible?
The farmer hugged us and left. That night, Molly and I decided to go into the village for a drink. Pre-Easter, the tourists hadn’t yet inundated the village; many of the seasonal businesses were closed, but a restaurant just outside Parikia, our landlord had advised me, would be open. Still damp from the bath, Molly squirmed into her red and white striped dress and pinned the wig into her hair.
When we entered the restaurant, I recognized the farmer and waved. But he only nodded and turned back to his drink, and I wondered if I’d offended him somehow during the afternoon. I spotted Irini and Maria and waved at them, too. But the farmer muttered something to them, and they averted their eyes. I shrugged at Molly and ordered Ouzo from a waiter who dropped the bottle onto the table with a glare and a snap of his white towel.
Molly’s eyes widened. She crouched beneath her black drapes. “Maybe we should get out of here. Maybe it’s a local place. I get the feeling they don’t like tourists.”
I poured the Ouzo. “We’re not bothering anybody. I don’t see why we can’t enjoy our drinks.” But we drank silently as stares and murmurs skirted our table.
His hands splayed on the tabletop, the farmer spouted angrily. Irini and Maria huddled near him, talking, Irini’s hand placating his forearm, Maria, shaking her head, no. Then Irini, followed by Maria hesitantly approached our table. Irini stared, then pointed. “Wife?” she asked. She pulled at her snaky curls, then pointed toward the farmer.
“God. The wig,” I said to Molly. “They think I have two wives.”
I nodded and held up one finger. “Wife.”
Irini grabbed Maria and turned to the bar, index finger extended. “Wife.”
A hubbub at the bar pushed the farmer from his chair, and he crossed to our table, his hands whirling around his head as he posed several questions, all unintelligible.
Irini patted Molly’s head, and the wig shifted.
“Take it off,” I said.
“I’ll be a mess,” Molly said.
“But they’ve never seen one. Take it off.”
“Please. No.” Molly’s eyes glittered at me from the dark curtains. “Please.”
“Please,” I said. “You’ll look fine. You always do. You’re a beautiful thing.”
Irini clapped her palms together. Molly’s eyes flashed, but she raised her hands. Blushing, she unpinned the wig to a loud “ah” from the bar. She rearranged her hair as the farmer grabbed the wig and planted it askew on his head, gesturing open-handed to himself as he jigged. Chairs banged to the floor. The wig hopped from head to head. The room roiled with laughter, whistles. “Wife,” Irini said, pointing at herself, the wig tangling in her unruly hair. Bottles of Ouzo appeared on the table. Arms clamped around my shoulders.When some good-natured villager finally nudged Molly and me out the door, my arm was around her waist, her wig was dangling from my pants pocket.
Back in the darkness of our farmhouse, Molly unzipped her dress. It slid slowly from her shoulders, down her hips. Naked, just a shade paler than the night, she ran her hands over her stomach and breasts, then started unbuttoning my shirt. Her hand darted into my pocket and grabbed the wig. She pinned it on, laughing, her raised arms lifting her breasts. She possessed her beauty completely, strangely as she played with the hair on her shoulders. Then she placed her palms on my chest and pushed me back onto the bed. Straddling me, she lowered herself onto my mouth and shuddered. I sucked her. I bit her, and then she slicked herself down my chest, my stomach. She lowered my trousers, and rocked herself onto me, a singsong gasp, as her long hair swished back and forth over my chest. And as she threw her head back, neck arched in moonlight, face eclipsed, I wondered who she was and gave myself over to her hands as she reached behind, under her legs, stroking, squeezing as her dark body pumped up and down.
The following afternoon I sat on the porch while Molly sunned herself. I kept trying to read, but the pages made no sense to me through the anise-flavored fog of the previous night. My eyes slid down the curve of Molly’s brown back, mounded the cleft rounds. I set aside the book and walked to her, licked her left shoulder.
“What?” she asked, turning.
And I took her hand and placed it on the crotch of my pants. “Come inside,” I said, and I raised h
er to her feet.
As she turned down the sheet, she smiled at me over her shoulder.
“Put on the wig,” I whispered.
“What?”
I yanked the wig from its stand and said, “Put on the wig.”
Taking the wig from me, she searched my face. She pinned the wig on, its blackness making her eyes unnaturally large. She slid into the bed and pulled the covers to her chin. I stretched next to her and tried to ease her onto my chest, but her spine stiffened. I parted her legs with my hand, rolled onto her. I remember only that she was very quiet.
During the next week and a half, I was careful only to request the wig occasionally. I wanted back that strangeness, that wildness, but the request hardened her. “Why?” she asked.
“It’s exciting,” I said.
“Why?” she asked
And I couldn’t answer.
When she wore the wig in bed, she did so with all the enthusiasm of a missionary wife accepting her conjugal duty and, afterwards, quickly returned it to the stand. I caught myself staring at it with a fetishistic wistfulness. Snap out of it, I told myself. But I couldn’t.
Molly stopped wearing the wig to the beach. When we left the farmhouse, I flashed it a parting glance. It looked lonely for a face. We started going to bed at different hours. When she sunbathed, Molly wore her plaid suit. Her tan developed tan lines.
One afternoon near the end of our stay, I returned from the beach alone and dropped my bag on the floor of the farmhouse. The Styrofoam head, completely bald, stared facelessly at me.
When Molly returned from the village, I asked, “Where’s the wig?”
Wordlessly, she disappeared into the door and threw something out at me. It landed in my lap. A mat, it looked obscene, pubic, the long tresses carelessly hacked with a dull knife. I did not bury my face in it and weep. And, later, when we discussed it, we both managed to keep our tones even as we lied. She said the wig was uncomfortable, hot. I said I understood, omitting to say that its strangeness excited me, that stranger than making love to a stranger was making love to a strange familiar. But, perhaps, I did not understand that then. I burned the wig in the small open hearth, and, a synthetic, it fizzled quickly to nothing.
We returned to Boston, our luggage lighter, less a hatbox. And I’ve realized since that our marriage turned on that vacation. Molly could have tolerated an affair with another woman, and, in fact, before the end of our marriage, she did. But she did not forgive me for the wig.
After the divorce, I saw her only once in one of those impossible coincidences that occur only around Christmas and only in New York when and where the odds least favor it. She was standing outside Mary Tully Hall in a lean black coat. She’d let her hair grow long into a pre-Raphaelite tumble of red, redder than I remembered. Perhaps she’d dyed it. She had her arm hooked through her escort’s, a tall, elegant man, an opera scarf fluttering over his topcoat. But perhaps I’ve only added that detail in revision. He looked young, fresh, his cheeks cold-buzzed. I’d heard she’d remarried, but perhaps he was not her husband. He may have been her stepson. I waved at her, and either she didn’t recognize me or she didn’t notice. Whichever, I felt suddenly foolish and old, a balding stranger estranged from his own past, a lost tourist. I disguised the wave as a flag for a cab, already late for my date, drinks at the Palm Court where I was overdue to meet my second wife.
The Folly of Being Comforted
(for Jay)
CLIFF HAD HAD IT. Since Linda had moved out, there was no one to answer the phone. The phone was always ringing—would he review this book, write that recommendation, play tennis with some emerging novelist—soon to be a minor motion picture. He wasn’t getting any of his own work done. Deadline deadzone. He wasn’t even getting any of the work done on the commercial book projects. He was huffy, that’s what he was, and determined to do something about it. So he called the phone company.
“I would like an unlisted phone,” he said.
“Yes, sir. Would you like the forty dollar fee included in your regular monthly billing?”
“Forty dollars? Forty dollars? To not list your phone? Maybe forty to list your phone, but to unlist it? Okay, what about this.What if I list the phone but in my uncle’s name?”
“There’s no fee for that, sir.”
“Okay, list the phone under William Butler Yeats.” He spelled out the last name.
For the first two weeks after Cliff listed the phone, the silence stunned him. He had never worked in such glorious quiet. Before Linda, his girlfriend, had moved out, she would answer the phone. But he could still hear the phone ring, Linda speaking in hushed tones, Linda scribbling messages. Now he had silence, splendid silence, to work in. No Linda. No ringing phone. Silence, a writer’s paradise. Nonetheless his pet commercial project, The History of Refrigeration, had stalled, so he turned instead to his second project, The Secret Lives of Herbs.
He read what he had written:
Origanum and other herbs cringe at the dreaded cutworm which pupate in mid-summer. The larvae of the owlet moth end their hibernation in the subfusc bowels of the earth only to creep and teem from their foul snuggery to terrorize the roots of the tender herb.
The prose had a turgid horror genre cast to it. Cliff shoved back his chair, rose, made tea, stared out the window at the snow ghosts spuming over the field. He selected his tea with finicky indecision—the orange, no the mint, no the orange. Vitamin C. This time of year, a wise choice, an excellent choice. Now which mug? Not the Shakespeare mug. Too much pressure. Maybe the delicate floral one. He drank his tea. Ten more minutes of aerobic staring. He steeped more tea.Yes, yes, the mint this time for a pick-me-up. The wind was whipping the snow into a flurry fury, bruiting the eddies about like brumal rumors. He let the steam of his tea fog the windowpane, and wrote in it with his index finger, “Ah, the writing life.” Through the wet letters he watched the snow skirl.
“Basil, borage, chervil, chive,” he chanted. “Potherbs keep old Cliff alive.”
He could not bear, he could not fucking bear, to go back to the keyboard. Larva of the Painted Lady Butterfly. Parsley worms. He was a serious poet, for Christ’s sake, and a fiction writer. Sweet Cicely, what he had to do to pay the bills. He tried singing out loud, “Sweet Cicely Brown.” Actually it didn’t feel that odd, singing a parody about herbs out loud. It occurred to him that this might not be a good sign.
It was time to get back to staring out of the window. Yep, mighty cold.Veritable wind chill factory today. Hey, one of those snow ghosts bore a surprising resemblance to Harold Bloom. Or more Zero Mostel? No, Bloom. No, definitely Mostel. Was it too early to uncork that little Vinho Verde from Portugal? A light bright little upstart wine with pretensions but no class anxiety. Three o’clock. If he sipped slowly, it would probably be okay.
When the phone rang, Cliff almost kissed it.
“Yes,” he said.
“Mr. Yeets?”
“YEETS? Yeets? You want to speak with Mr. Yeets?”
“Yes, Mr. Yeets, I am calling in behalf of the Tru-brite aluminum siding company. How are you today Mr.Yeets?”
“Appalled, that’s how I am. Do you know what is wrong with this country? Do you?”
“You can improve the appearance and value of your home, Mr. Yeets, with aluminum siding, professionally installed, while at the same time affording your home, your major investment, additional protection from the weather.”
“Do you know who you are talking to? You can’t sell me aluminum siding. I am a major poet. I live in a cabin “of clay and wattles made” not waffle irons made. And it’s Yeats, not Yeets.”
“Yeats? William Butler Yeats?”
“Yes.”
“Are you the one who wrote Sailing to Pandemonium?”
“Yes, yes.”
“We read that in high school.”
“Yes, yes, that is mine. ‘That is no country for old men,’” Cliff recited.
“Yep, that’s it.”
“I know that
’s it. I wrote it. ‘Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of aluminum architect.’”
“I can’t believe it. William Butler Yeats, the poet. I have to call my English teacher.”
She rang off. Cliff rubbed the phone against his cheek. Okay, that was diverting. But no remedy for herbal avoidance.
Aluminum saleswoman, what a dilly. Where there’s a dill, there’s a way. Lovage conquers all. Lovage makes the world go round. The herb book earned the pennyroyal. Here today and tarragon tomorrow. Cliff slumped into the desk chair.
He wrote, “The heinous Japanese beetle performs karaoke versions of ‘All You Need Is Love’ until lemon balm wilts and flags and dies a slow arduous death.” Sigh. Winter in Vermont. Snow packed up around the psyche. Invisible snow lizards squiggled through the brain. Day was two hours long. And too long. Maybe he should make a little plate of Ethan Frome fromage and think about that Vinho Verde again. The phone zinged him as if it were wired into his spine. He jingled. He jangled. He sprang from the chair.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Yeats?”
“Yes.”
“My teacher says that you’re dead.”
“I’m not dead.”
“She says that you died in 1939.”
“You can hear me, right? Do I sound dead? BOO. Shoo. Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.”
“You wrote that, too?”
“I did.”
“Look, do you want to buy aluminum siding?”
“Pour moi? Nope. That is no country for aluminum. Grecian goldsmiths made my home of hammered gold and gold enamelling.”
“Mister Yeats, it isn’t very nice to make fun of someone who’s just trying to earn a living. We work for commission, you know.”
“Me, too. Want to buy a poem?”
Click.
Okay, in some dim way Cliff hated himself. Okay, she wasn’t a member of the gifted and talented class. But he was sick of himself, sick of his meanness, sick of herbs, sick of how he thought. How does one stop thinking how one thinks? He was a total bore, a tidal bore, a wild boar, wild borage. He drank the bottle of Vinho Verde.