Shockproof Sydney Skate

by Marijane Meaker

  “It was Ali she didn’t want to hurt, but she was too far removed from her superego to perceive that.”

  Silence.

  Shockproof said, “What’s she going to do?”

  “She’ll get some professional help.”

  “I thought she was already getting that.”

  “She doesn’t really qualify anymore as a general analysand.”

  Whatever that meant.

  What? The loony bin? Timmy in Listen to the Silence living with the clang of locking doors, wire cages, peeling paint; the sausages cut up so the women wouldn’t—

  Right now: stop.

  “Do you know this Fay Foote?” Raoul said.

  “Not well.”

  “What? I didn’t hear you.”

  “She’s some dyke.” He had never used the word before.

  “She has Ali’s makeup kit. It’s not an expensive thing, not anything that couldn’t be replaced, but Ali wants it back. That’s one of her symptoms: her obsession with material things, money.”

  “I could call her up, I guess, if she wants it so much.”

  “I’ll give you Ali’s address in L.A. She can send it there.”

  Then he began to talk about his affection, his more-than-affection for Ali; the fact he was once going to marry her; how he had dismissed so many warning signals; you don’t see them in someone close to you, do you? On and on.

  Shockproof remembered a woman M.E. was seeing for a time, in between Cappy and Corita. She was very beautiful, named Lauraine. She was always calling on the telephone at odd hours in the early morning, sending so many different bouquets at one time that the florist had to use two boys to deliver all of them; special deliveries, telegrams, on and on.

  Her code name was “Lawrence.” There was always gossip about Lawrence. Lawrence cracked up his XKE in Provincetown; Lawrence turned over an entire table full of food one night at Joe Allen’s; Lawrence sang along with Carol Channing during a performance of Hello, Dolly! until the ushers removed him bodily from the theater. Oh God, that Lawrence. At times M.E. would double over laughing, tears rolling down her cheeks.

  Suddenly, so it seemed, M.E. had instructed Shockproof to tell Lauraine she was not at home when Lauraine telephoned; then M.E. had their telephone number changed and listed privately. One day in M.E.’s address book, Lauraine’s name, address and phone number were inked out with a Markette. The last gossip he had heard of Lawrence was that he was at Cool Breeze, in Connecticut. “Actually at Cool Breeze,” as Corita Carr had put it. “Come on! We saw it coming.”

  “Well, Sydney,” Raoul said. “I guess you know what I’ve come here about?”

  “Come here about?” Shockproof was still caught up in the memory of Lauraine; now shaken from it and unable to comprehend what could possibly follow.

  Raoul said, “You’ll see to the snake, hmmm? It’s driving Mrs. Gray up the wall, and she has to pack Ali’s things.”

  She was not at all what he expected Alison’s mother to be like. She was short and bosomy with very thin legs, and a choppy, almost militant gait. She was carrying various articles of clothing from the bedroom to the living room. She had long fingers and seemed unwilling to use more than the first one on her right hand and her thumb to deposit Alison’s things into a large steamer trunk near the door. She had the attitude of some missionary dutifully cleaning out a leper’s lair. Her expression was sour and tumid, and she gave Shockproof as much attention as she might have accorded a tradesman’s assistant, unable even to manage a nod when Shockproof entered with Raoul. Raoul did not introduce them either.

  The television was playing on the table: Hannibal, starring Victor Mature and Rita Gam.

  “I can’t take both the snake and the cage now,” Shockproof told Raoul. “I’ll have to take the snake now, and then come back for the cage.”

  “You’re going to take the snake in your hands?” she said.

  “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din,” Raoul chuckled, as Shockproof opened the top of the cage.

  “Hello, Dr. Teregram.”

  “Don’t call it that,” said Mrs. Gray. “Forty dollars an hour, three times a week; it’s not my idea of a joke.” Again, she was talking to no one in particular.

  “He probably has to,” Raoul said. “The thing probably knows its name.”

  “They don’t have ears,” said Shockproof. “It’s just a habit.”

  “Alison said she fed it yesterday,” Raoul said.

  “Fed it,” Mrs. Gray said in a disgusted tone to the steamer trunk.

  “She wanted you to know that,” Raoul said.

  Shockproof picked up the King, looped her across his shoulder.

  “Oh, and wait!” Raoul said, disappearing a moment.

  Shockproof waited. Across the television screen came Ann MacReynolds, playing the female computer, waltzing off with the black-masked, silver-sabered box of Porproganni spaghetti.

  Raoul reappeared. “Ali wanted you to have this.”

  It was the board with the mottled snake skin attached, which she had mounted herself and shellacked.

  Shockproof parked the Mercedes on Central Park West, and walked east toward Belvedere Castle and the Revolutionary War forts and the sloping, ledgy hills and cliffs. People turned and looked back at him as he passed carrying the King. The decision to bring her here had not been made carefully, though he supposed some intuitive thought process had evolved from all that had happened since summer began. It would never have occurred to him to let her go at the beginning of the summer. He would have caged her, cared for her meticulously, sparing her fungus, mites, dampness. He would have tortured himself with insomnial visions of Lorna Dune getting hold of her.

  He was still uncertain that it was the right decision, and not sure he could go through with it. He thought of pointing himself in the direction of the zoo instead, of handing her over to someone there for safekeeping.

  Cancer Ward.

  Remember when Oleg was released from the hospital, his visit to the zoo? The sign on the white owl’s cage: “The white owl endures captivity with difficulty.”

  They know it—and still they imprison him.

  The black bear poking his nose at the wire of the cage, then suddenly jumping up and just clinging there desperately; the polar bear in the hundred-degree heat; the deer without running space; the sacred Indian zebu cow behind bars; the agouti, the monkeys; the eyes of the nilgai antelope, light brown, large, dear—like the eyes of Oleg’s lover, Vega—was it witchcraft, a transmigration of soul? Vega asking, “Can it be that you won’t come?”

  He kneeled in the grass holding on to Dr. Teregram. He thought of Alison aboard a plane, flying back to California with her father, whom Shockproof had never seen and could not even visualize.

  Shockproof had the idea that it had all happened in a dream, like life had happened in Bruno’s Dream to Bruno for nearly ninety years.

  It’s all a dream … one goes through life in a dream, it’s all too hard.… There is no “it” for it to be all about. There is just the dream, its texture, its essence, and in our last things we subsist only in the dream of another, a shade within a shade, fading, fading, fading.

  Overhead a plane growing smaller and smaller in the blue sky, and old Bruno trying to save a fly from a spider with the strength left from dying.… Shockproof shook off the daydreams of books to try and deal with things.… Would she be all right? Would who be all right—Dr. Teregram or Alison?

  Would who be all right? And now he was back into Bruno’s dying, unable to remember things, wondering if death was waking up from the dream.

  Remember the letter to Joyce Carol Oates from the novel’s heroine in the middle of Them? Maureen Wendall’s letter complaining about books: None of them ever happened. In my life something happened and I have to keep thinking about it over and over.

  He could take the King back to Nineteenth Street; he could convince ME. to let him keep it until he found someone to care for it, or placed it with a reputable
dealer.

  There were cliffs nearby with crevices, secluded and tangled, with wild roots crisscrossed over them. Springs in Virginia on walks with Joel, he had seen whole bevies of heads of rattlers, copperheads, and black snakes peering from slits in sun-warmed rocks.

  Shockproof put the snake down on the grass.

  Like all snakes, Dr. Teregram was not eager to move before she’d sized up the situation. Her head was up; she could have been a twisted stick lying in a field, except for the forked tongue darting in and out, investigating.

  He imagined himself to be her, stood dead still, his tongue flickering lightly to smell the air, abruptly knifing suddenly slickly through the grass, pointing for the Egyptian obelisk near Eighty-fourth, gliding, gliding…

  Fifteen

  HOME

  The next time Sydney Skate heard from Alison Gray, it was Christmas. He was home for vacation. There was a card from her with a lion cub on the front; on the back in small print: Proceeds from the sale of these cards benefit the East African Wild Life Society.

  Inside Alison had written:

  Dear Sydney,

  Seasons Greetings, as they say. I thought this card was just right for you and looked for one with a snake on it, but I guess that would be too bent for Joyeux Noel. Sydney, I called Fay F. in October about my makeup kit and she said you had it. Do you? I really miss it. It’s a Gucci and cost a lot. Tell everyone hello. Beaucoup love, Alison.

  It was postmarked Armonk, New York.

  Christmas Eve afternoon M.E. threw a big party, which she and Liz Lear prepared for two days ahead of time, cooking and decorating the house; forty guests were invited. Estelle Kelly had been asked, but Gracious Me would not allow her to attend, because Balls Off still disapproved of Sydney.

  “He calls you ‘the junkie,’” Estelle had written him while he was at Cornell, “so if you’re going to write me, send the letter c/o Agatha Henry at Barnard, but if you’re too busy getting head I’ll sneak out Xmess Eve for a fast one with you in the local pub. The big news is Gracious Me is knocked up; one in the oven at her age!”

  For a while, Sydney bartended the party. Ellie and Gloria were there; Judy Ewen and Corita; Fay Foote and her husband; Victor and Paul; Ann MacReynolds who was going with Cappy now; Roger Wolfe with his mother who was visiting from Memphis; on and on.

  At one point, Mr. Boris climbed up on a hassock and asked everyone to be quiet; then he announced “the engagement of my daughter, Loretta, to Albert Allen Service. They’ll be married at St. Thomas on Twelfth Night, next month.”

  There was applause and cheers, and Hippy Hair, who was there with Mike and Deborah, serenaded the betrothed by playing “With a Little Help from My Friends” on a comb covered with Zig Zag roll-your-own cigarette paper.

  Sydney was called away in the midst of this performance to take a telephone call in M.E.’s bedroom.

  “Merry Christmas, son,” said Harold Skate.

  “Merry Christmas.”

  “Your stepmother and I are real proud of you. Morty Goldman’s over here, and I’ve been telling him about that paper—Morty, this is Sydney on the phone. Pick up in the kitchen, Morty. This is Sydney. I couldn’t pronounce that word, Sydney, but I was telling Morty about it. That’s his department. I told him you were a lab assistant in the Zoology—Morty?”

  “Merry Christmas, Sydney,” a man’s voice said. “Happy Chanukah.”

  “Merry Christmas,” Sydney said.

  “Morty,” Harold Skate said, “I want to introduce my son, Sydney. Sydney, this is Dr. Goldman, our local zoologist.”

  “I’m only a vet,” Goldman laughed. “How do you do, Sydney.”

  “How do you do.”

  “What was that paper, Sydney? They’re going to publish it, Morty, in some big scientific journal. Kid’s only a freshman in college.”

  “What’s it about, Sydney?” Goldman said.

  “Tell him, Sydney,” said Harold Skate. “He’s a lab assistant, Morty. They usually give that job to grad students.”

  “What’s it about, Sydney?” Goldman said.

  “Parthenogenesis,” said Sydney.

  “Congratulations,” said Goldman.

  “Your stepmother’s here. She wants to talk to you,” said Harold Skate.

  “It’s nice to meet you,” said Goldman.

  “Same here,” Sydney said.

  “Sydney?” said Rosemary Skate. “Did you get a notice of your subscription?”

  “Not yet, Rosemary.”

  “National Geographic, Sydney. Merry Christmas. We got your package, but we don’t open our presents until tomorrow morning, so we can’t really thank you.”

  “Thank you,” Sydney said. “Merry Christmas.”

  Harold Skate was back on the phone. “Sydney? Listen, Sydney. You stick to your bugs and snakes and other animals. We don’t need any geniuses in the swimming pool business. I tell my customers I’ve got a son who’s going to be off in Norway someday collecting a Nobel Prize.”

  “Sweden, Hal! Sweden!” Goldman shouted in the background. “Stockholm.”

  “Anyway,” said Harold Skate, “Merry Christmas, son.”

  “Thanks, Dad. Same to you and Rosemary.”

  When he hung up, Liz Lear was standing in the doorway. “You’re fired, Sydney,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Canned. This party no longer needs a bartender.”

  “I was going to quit anyway, for a while.”

  “Shep says you’ve got a date. You want to take my car?”

  “I’ve got mine out front.”

  “Mine’s got new snow tires.”

  “Thanks, anyway, but I haven’t had any trouble,” he said. “Hey, thanks for all the record albums, too, Liz.”

  “I get them for nothing, Sydney. It’s graft.”

  Then M.E. appeared. “Liz, Gloria’s getting very thick-tongued. Can you get some coffee into her?”

  “I’ll try, love. Where’s Ellie, though?”

  “She’s moving her car to the garage on Irving Place. She can’t do anything with her, anyway; you’re the authority on Gloria Inhercups.… Sydney? It’s snowing out. If you’re going way up to Estelle’s, why don’t you take Liz’s car? She’s got new snow tires.” M.E. added, “It’s a Porsche, too, Sydney.”

  “Oh, I’ll get there,” Sydney said.

  “You won’t be late, will you?”

  “I’ll be back before this thing breaks up.”

  “Sydney, we’ll open our gifts tomorrow,” M.E. said. “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ll clean up this mess later. Come back and help. Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  “Don’t forget.… Give your old ma a kiss.”

  Before he left, he reached into the huge crystal brandy snifter on M.E.’s bureau for matchbooks: O’Neal’s, Maxwell’s Plum, Daly’s, and West Boondock. For Christmas he had bought Estelle a gold frog pin with green eyes, which he had ordered from the Neiman-Marcus Christmas Book.

  “Male frogs are real horny when they make out,” he told Estelle, while they were sitting at the bar of the Boeuf à la Mode, near East End Avenue in the Eighties. “A male russet frog will leap on a female’s back and squeeze like hell. You can do anything to him, touch him, tease him, even decapitate him—he won’t let go. If the water’s cold, he can hang on for weeks. Sometimes he squeezes so hard, he caves in the female’s chest.”

  He was trying hard to think of things to talk about, because Estelle was just sitting there gulping down egg nogs and playing with the gold frog, while everyone in the place stared at her. She was wearing a Santa Claus suit which was several times her size, that Balls Off had worn the night before at a party for airline employees’ families; she was wearing the white beard, and the long red and white stocking cap, and each time she would order another she’d slap the counter with her fist and shout: “Ho! Ho! Ho! Santa’s ready for another load.”

  “A praying mantis is the same way,” said Sydney. “I
mean, he’s just as tenacious, only the female’s the voracious one. She actually eats him while he’s delivering his semen.”

  “A cock-sucking praying mantis.”

  “I don’t mean that kind of ‘eat,’ Estelle. She’s a cannibal. If she gets him in a breeding cage, where he can’t escape, she takes off his head.”

  “You go to my head,” Estelle sang out.

  “Some physiologists think decapitation actually increases the male’s generative power.”

  “You’re all a bunch of fucking masochists. Balls Off’s using deodorants now,” she said, “because Gracious Me won’t cohabit with him if he hasn’t used his Right Guard.” She hit the bar. “Ho! Ho!—”

  Sydney interrupted. “Spiders, too,” he said to stop her. He signaled for another round.

  “What?”

  “I said spiders, female spiders go for the male’s head, too.”

  “Bestiality,” said Estelle. “Is that what you’re up to at Cornell; is that why you don’t have time to write?”

  “I brought you some matchbooks.” He fumbled in the pocket of his coat to find them.

  “Are you doing sheep up in the country?”

  “Here,” he said, piling them in front of her. “Four different ones.”

  “I gave up smoking, Ranchman.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I was forced to give it up by Whale-Belly. You’d think she was giving birth to the Christ child. She says smoking pollutes the air in an apartment. You know when they did it?”

  “Did what?” he said. “Who?”

  “Balls Off and Gracious Me. They did it in Hawaii when I was with them. Right under my nose. I counted back. She’s five months gone.”

  “I’m sorry, Estelle.”

  “I felt the thing kick in her stomach. She made me do it. If you ask me, she’s going to give birth to a fucking ox.”

  “Do they want a boy or a girl?”

  “What the hell do you care what they want? You didn’t write once.”

  “I’ve been all wrapped up in what I’m doing. I wrote this paper,” he said.

  She said, “Piss off.”

  “It’s about parthenogenesis,” he said. “It’s going to be published in this little quarterly.”