Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand

by Sleights of Hand- The Deception Issue (retail) (epub)

  A fawn, Cicisbeo [Chee-chees-báy-oh],

  for Madame who sat you in the streets. Hot still at ninety, she will take this fawn. She needs no lure, no arm twist, no hard sell. Smolders, she, under a keratin hide, and opens, by heat that royal red mouth, that royal disguise of blue embers. Opens! Our Mamán! Trapped when she was twenty-five, unbagged at thirty-six, say what? Say it was the Crocodile trap, center theme to our childish play, The Play of the Weather, set in Summer’s Heat on Biscayne Bay and say this. She is in the trap. What squeezer nipped her scrag, Cicisbeo, that you unbagged her?

  The Play: Summer’s Rain

  washes mud from cloven hoof of Fawn, and puts it back again. Thunder quells the Hawking Gulls and the Wind blows hard at the Wind. Reptiles lashed from roost and Spiders from the web see the Fish Cave trimmed, the Trees, and their Rookeries. Perish, the Chicks, and the rain-stung tan of Childish Arms turns pale as they, the Arms, sashay, attached, still, to the Child Trunk as the Palm Fronds were not to the Tree. Summer’s Rain becomes a Storm, then anagnorisis, the recognition scene that spins themoral tale of who is trapped and who is not.

  Playing Ourselves,

  we enter Storm. Sizzles the current in the air, and the sun-baked street stings our tender feet. Steam escapes between our toes and we shrill, fear in our throats, for the God is in the steam. Stood still the Traffic in a Dog’s Rain, wet the brakes, and the Cat’s Rain ate half an hour, and the God was in that half hour.

  Car

  was the safest place to be, windows up, doors locked, wipers feint the gods fobbing left, shamming right, erasing, then erased, by the worthier opponent. Our eyes peeled to the wind’s paroxysm and the rain’s paroxysm, and we sweat wide eyed at unknown peril, like child voyeurs pouring over an adult book, rapt by the pinkish tint of the counter-parry, say what? Say

  Red

  refracted by the Pelting Rain, made for a pinkish tint from the traffic light. This, Cicisbeo, the counter parry. The Sheeted Rain slapped against the glass, our Maidenhead, with the Wind’s force, and the Wind’s cadence, over, over, again and again, globbed the God into glass, the Sperm of Jove against our Maidenhead, savage in air; turned substance in the cataract.

  Touché!

  It was erratic and terrifying and very, very good. Chaste inside, but suffocating. Lightning. Thunder. Somebody would say, inevitably, “Thank God, the tires are made of rubber.” “By Jove, they are,” shot back. It passed the time, broke the spell, gave us reason to shift, as we had sweat the seats. Red blur that had been pink turned green. Who played Backseat Driver sputtered, “Don’t go!” and we yelled,

  “Crocodiles!”

  at the Palm Fronds downed, rushing past the tires. A river of Crocodiles. The Swamp churned and You idled, Cicisbay. Who said “By Jove,” now says “See, Jove rolls over,” and we roll the windows down. Light Rain cooled hottened cheeks. She lit a cigarette, say what? Had it been her ambition, say, or her frustration, sustained and merciless, pelting, taunting the window through which she viewed her Miami life, had she felt unable to move or to breathe, were she stuck in place and found the air around her stale with the smell of children, that was it.

  The Crocodile’s trap

  in The Play of the Weather. Climate was but mise-en-scène and we knew nothing of her duress. Jove could turn over as he like, but she was stuck in Miami with us. She was our Crocodile, the danger outside the Chevy. Trapped inside. Each day we faced this danger and did not know it. And she did not know us or our audacity in the open streets under a tropic sun.

  She did not know

  we crossed with the red, Cicisbay, and on our own and on our trikes at Fifty-Ninth Avenue. We knew where we were going, the corner drug and soda fountain, entered en suite, proud, proprietary; we parried those who paid, who sat the counter: “En garde! We want the right of way!” They laughed, retreated, said, “Touché!” and so we sat together and ordered the glass of water we didn’t have to pay for. We had only to want. From counter stools we swung tan legs with golden hairs, drank slowly, pressed our noses into glass, made faces through refracted light. When had she set out with such surety?

  Native-born to Biscayne Bay

  we did not hesitate. Up at dawn, we shortcut the neighbor’s lawn and left behind their hedges frayed by handlebars, by narrow shoulders, tightened fists, by toys we clutched in pistol grip. We played Fiendish Doctor, House on Fire, we dressed and undressed Cyd Charisse, Hedy Lamarr, Veronica Lake—paper dolls in the killing fields. We parried insects and muddy strays, tore eyestalk from the hated crabs on land that wedged between the paving stones; dismembered, afterward, those Gecarcinidae, made charm from longer claw. Breakfast stuck to our faces, framed by the uncombed hair. In mismatched plaids we congregated on the concrete sidewalk, in front of the house I was born into. Our front porch was no more than a brick stoop leading up to stucco walls, but no one crossed it or came inside to play. We played on porch.

  Croc, twenty-nine in 1954,

  East Texas, Russian-in-the-face-and-ankles, and photogenic. Voluptuous the hips, red lips, dark hair, blue eyes, round shouldered. Neck up, she had the Ava Gardner look. A pouty look but not a come-hither or shiksa look. Formidable. Desirable. Without the Ava jaw or dimple or chiseled nose. Memorable the look, with Lucky Strike between her ruby reds she was Ava nonetheless, in Marimekko dress.

  At ninety,

  she no longer leaves men whiplashed by her leave, but prattles on about her painting, turns idle talk to New Yorkese and boasts of those Who’s Whoers she once knew and how, like her, they too were trapped in Biscayne Bay. At ninety, with that extra push of Texas air, she wheezes the leitmotif from life’s accordion: “New YORK.” “FLOHR-da.” Tunes that never will let go. There is much I do not know of her, or of my love for her, or where this fawn will go, say what, Cicisbeo? Say we are back in Miami, 1955. Madame Tough behind the wheel, sat you in the streets. You chased down the Who’s Whoers in that swampland, expats in the Grove: Mexican, French, Cuban, South African survivors of the comedown from New YORK, transplants to her swamp. You did this! Bravo!

  We saw her

  roll the window down; we saw her sigh; we saw the fugitive’s breath, freighted with history, blow from those ruby rims, but we did not understand. Unseen, the inhale that would point her toward the best of times. Her inhale upticked north. But truly the best of times were at her back, the apartment, postwar New York,

  on Riverside Drive.

  He, her Army Captain, Medical Supply Desk, Wall Street, sported regulation holster and the captain’s pistol in it. They took the downtown train. And she, self-assigned with brushes, detrains at Fifty-Seventh Street, turns in at the Art Students League. Croc in that hothouse hide husbands her mind, rakes through the autumn of Matisse afire; begins to paint as God began, in winter. Under Morris Kantor and Will Barnet, the figure. Comes spring, and she, heavy with child, breathes in the new abstraction, Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock. The best of times.

  New York was now the exhale,

  factory whistle of the call to work, the call to art. God’s call. Trapped, she could not go. Down from New York, she enters Miami with the Infanta, and her Captain buys a single-story stucco, two-bed, one-bath with an extra room, and she set her easel in that extra room. Again with child in summer, she painted. Cool in my sleeping sac, I felt her gaze on canvas, her hand on summer’s brush, then fall. No hand, no eye held by their ardor my growing cocoon throughout my season, through to the final Storm, a category four, a Trapper of a hurricane. Entered hospital early, she stayed long. From her window one could see the palm fronds curbed and all the rest.

  I was cribbed

  in the ex-atelier by Croc. Home was now three-bed, one-bath. Young, I did not grasp the composition, the central easel, and the cornered c
rib. Vapors clung to the walls, lulled me into the turpentine sleep of the night watch.

  We were at odds

  with each other, Croc and I. Our war went everywhere between us; it spoiled my bath, where the Infanta, toga wrapped in fresh towels from the first bath, lingered, witness to my history. Olive skinned in white, flushed in the cheek, she, a Roman senator in high relief upon the doorjamb of our battle, she, waited for this, my memory, age three: Croc stood me at arm’s length, imperious with painful grip, she froze my impish jests. Grip. Pause. Wink to the Infanta. Attack! With the inexorable deliberation that marks the native pace and nastiness of her species, Croc says, in a voice not yet forgotten—first, the high note of her accusation, and then the low—“You should smell your bottom!”

  Stirrer of strife,

  my father’s wife! Followed, my silence. Then, impeccable defense, “My head can’t reach my bottom.” How hard they laughed at me, how black their blood. They etched their acid sneers into my beating heart. Ran wet to my room. Mine! Locked! Triumphant my bed, my monument, pulled from corner, pushed to center to be my stage. Mine! Grabbed, my forty-five, my vinyl victory wreath, set needle in groove, brought player to speed.

  “Crack”

  went the futurist pops of the silent band, then, song: “Dan, Dan the Fireman; He puts out the fire as quick as he can.” Dan! I spun, I leaped upon my monument. Someone who loved Dan very much sang his praise. His mother or sister. Or princess in a smoky tower. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, she sang. As if on cue, seeped in from under door and rose, their scorn for Dan, the empress’s, the senator’s, inflamed my indignation, set fire to my fun. Undressed by them again, I froze in baby ire.

  Had they not noticed?

  How I reasoned with head upon my shoulders the head’s nonreach. How I’d stood up for myself, formed a well-constructed sentence with subject, verb, and object of the verb, and how I joined well the verb’s auxiliary to my abnegation. Mine! Had they not noticed how I’d made sense of wicked nonsense? No, they did not notice, nor how I held in mind the differential calculus resulting from our match. Two against One. As she tells it, my father’s wife, the babies, and Miami were his idea. One against Three, hers, the insuperable math. Memories paled but the body rendered well. Tears rendered well, and the hot flush. Sound rendered best as I remembered this.

  Remembered, also this:

  I return from the killing fields to my front door locked, no answer to my knock. No answer when I held the bell or to my cry or angry stomp, or to the killed catch I flung across the door. Curse on the door to the house that had been my home! Eyestalk of crab, tail of dog and monarch wing, razed in adolescent ire. I sat the curb and waited, dressed and undressed Cyd Charisse. A slanting sun peered up our legs. Good neighbors took me in, telephoned my father’s wife. She answered! “Oh, we’re here, have been … a long afternoon. Why? Was something wrong,” she asked, “that you are calling me?” She had to ask. Good neighbor’s eyes were fixed on me. Pity swiftly measured pain. Silently, I did the math. Entered house through the now unlocked door, fathomed the silence, which did not crack or pop in anticipation of my entrance, nor follow the spiral groove of happiness. In the back bedroom, my father in the master bed, one eye bandaged in the darkened room and at the end of the bed, his feet, unattended, sang of that long man in the bed, a long drink of water as I would also be. He smiled weakly, fixed the other eye on me. And then, he slept. When he was well, I attached myself to him, and he seemed not to mind.

  I’ve caught up to you, Cicisbeo.

  Yes? Madame Croc, trapped in Miami, pines for New York. What to do? The wife’s car was a fact after the war; it gained her new freedoms. A Mercedes, yes, but for the boycott of German cars and the Jewish boycott of Ford. The whole lot of suburban prejudice idled some lives, jump-started others. There was a nagging sense of moral outrage vexed by the need to do something, anything, to put distance between oneself and all of that. Her Captain buys a Chevrolet.

  Feigns happiness

  for her finless four-door blue sedan. Will take her where she needs to go, her Cicisbeo. The name adds the kind of class one doesn’t have to pay for. One day, surely, she will lower her eyes, cast her spell, inhale, and you, Cicisbay, will pull up to her palazzo.

  Closest to Madame

  as none of us were, Cicisbay, your sun now sets, stirs the dust of my unearned shame, gives a slant-rayed stab to my memories. It is snowing dust inside my head, my head is in Miami, where she is in the car. This, the anagnorisis, the recognition scene. Her breath is in the car, her voice, her words. Her scorn is in the car. But I am not in the car. Your sun heats my shame, unglues the cubist image of this boychild become girlchild, stored in the adult mind, fades this child’s imperfect ink, rewrites the moral tale.

  Miserere, Cicisbay.

  Your job was to alleviate just the right amount of Madame’s suffering. Daddy will build Madame’s palazzo, but see how she resists, requests Le Corbusier instead. Had Daddy urged Corbusier, she’d have parried Corbusier, extracted a palazzo. Blue embers heat that keratin hide, ignite her royal blood, set her going and there’s no end to it. She comes by Corbusier with a protégé of his, 1955, a New York architect transplanted to Miami. Upticked the compass of her inhale.

  Uncle Ralph,

  accountant to Miami bookies, flies weekly to Havana, sits the airport bar, orders, de rigueur, the glass of water he doesn’t have to pay for and down goes the briefcase to the floor freeing up his hands when sits the bar beside him a Man with the twin valise who orders a real drink and down the hatch, the two of them before God swallow their spit and Ralph leaves with the twin valise! A good man, Ralph, forgoes the Tropicana, arrives home for supper in Miami where Daddy sits the supper table with Ralph and Ralph’s wife, Sally. Daddy’s full when he heads home, his fortune sealed in the envelope from Ralph. Inside, the sacred deed to Florida land is folded and encumbered. Home! and down it goes, deed to the table under crocodile eyes. She does not read the coordinates, nor the caveat that insures obeisance to the mob, “Should need arise.”

  “Rest assured,”

  Uncle Ralph had said, “No one needs this land.” Back in the envelope, folded still, Daddy’s deed of five acres south of the urban grid. Back in they go, his sixty-foot pines, the salt-hardened ground. At the western end, Daddy built our “Bauhaus,” post-Corbusier. Broad and airy as a loaf of white bread in a Slavic pine forest, our Bauhaus wants to lift off. Cape Corbusier. The floor plan: open terrazzo, split level. You look up: polished plywood eighteen feet high. You look south: glass walls open onto the forest. Below ground: his basement, or flood zone, our torture chamber, or make-out chamber, or bomb shelter, changes with the season. Out front: a semicircular drive, one of the first. Daddy parks his long-finned Cadillac against the backdrop of his loaf of bread. New money! He has only to sell the other four acres. More money! The Croc has only to paint. And how she paints! Wowsers! What paint! What titles! Torrid Zone, Burnt Offering, Uninhabitable Architecture. Her suffering! It has returned. Get to work, Cicisbay!

  To leave the pine forest,

  you took the Old Cutler Road, its wall of banyan trees softened by the cool canopy of chigger moss to filter light. A left at the Old Cutler Road led to Coral Gables. A right, to the sands and palms of Matheson Hammock. Cicisbeo, we were old enough that your movements were now on our radar. When possible, the Croc left the forest with you. Not us. We saw her roll down the window, put cigarette to ruby reds, and make the whooshing sound, exhaling what it was that was disturbing her. I suspect you cut a left at Old Cutler because at dinner she opined about M. Berger’s (Mizeure Bearrrzhair’z) Antiques. If not M. Berger’s, it was the clothesline show at the Ryder Art Gallery, or the recorder
group at Arnie Grayson’s, or her visit to Eddy Mirrell & Eddie Weyhe, potters whose pet iguana stayed on leash when Croc was on property. Because, retrievable with leash. This is what I knew of her gadabout town, her absence before her absence.

  One day a brunette enters an eighteenth-century tavern, sets the air astir. Men sigh but none can speak. And Goethe, there among them, Johann mute, mit wolfen eyes devours her complexion hair and dress against the whitewashed wall. And the wolf in him is such that as she takes her leave he sees her still on whitewashed wall, chromatically reversed: the hair turned light, the face turned black, the dress the color of its complement.

  Occasionally, Cicisbeo, you’d cut a right. She would plash against the gentle tide, burrow into sand warm as youth, and enter the water. She took charcoal with her, and paper with her. To draw the trees. Croc might have left the forest with one of us. But rarely two when the sun shone.

  She took the Infanta

  to draw the trees. She had first to subdue this child’s fear of the vacant page that stared her down from drawing board. Drawing was martial, gravitas against emptiness; for Croc it was a thinking art, as regards weapon and approach. “Serafina,” for that was her unlikely name, “take the willow charcoal; hold lightly in your hand, here. Now start.” Serafina froze the willow stick in air. “Move your hand. Scumble in the shape. Use light and dark to show me what is near and what is far.” Seri grandly staged the reticent, noiseless smile that says, “I understand”; and with that smile drew gray willow down. Croc changed what willow nub was left, placed the sturdier black charcoal stick, compressed, medium soft, in the child hand, wadded up the warm-up page, pulled down a second vacant sheet. “Now weight the blankness in the paper with your line.” Seri raised the regal curtain of her lips, vermilion and keratin strong in the curtain. Even if I wasn’t there I knew the thrill of this, her smile. Blinkered into view, the misaligned, irresistible left canine brought tumescence to her upper lip, caught, the eye of her beholder. Burrowed into every memory anyone ever had of her was the charm of this tumescence. Serafina was Sephardim, flashed the ancestral line of her father’s mother, Sue, would soon rival the Croc for beauty beyond Ava. For now, she enjoyed the intimacy of being ruled. There was time, before pearls of baby teeth gave way to steel retainer and jade eyes deepened behind glass.