Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand

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

  My blonde aspect

  and long legs now placed me firmly female on the paternal Russian-German side. A high jumper in the fifth grade, I was five feet nine in the sixth, outjumped the girls, would have the boys, but Coach sent me inside before I could. Croc, amused, said no more about this talent or future stardom, my Olympiad; had something else in mind. More than once after class excursion I climbed breathless, happy, into the Chevy of her debriefing. “Your britches are split up the middle,” she welcomed me, undressed me, with flinted sardony. Ignited, my childish wrath, at the repeat in history. I was her savage child who tattered herself. She was ready to give me options for which I was unprepared. “Stop with that sass or you can get out here at the corner.” A bad corner, my right foot tapped out code to keep me safe. Uptick, down, and all the rest. Hormone-soaked seconds prolonged the humiliation. I had not the courage to open the door to free myself.

  The code:

  Alongside a curb, press foot to floor, as though you were to brake. Crosswise to intersections, driveways, and where there is no curb; rear up, dear foot, my drawbridge, protection from the broadside. If I did not pay attention something terrible would happen. Down-up-down, the stink of fear in the concentration. We passed through neighborhoods in Miami without sidewalks and curbs, places that required more than an adjustment by my foot, where people’s lives were in peril. The Croc, too, was absorbed in thought.

  Dan’s crooners

  morphed into teen radio: “Dan Dan the party man, kick those legs …” Adolescent long legs were a liability, lacked discipline, frayed the light cotton worn against Florida heat as surely as a crocodile jaw could ravage the tender bottoms of her young. As surely as the mob could ravage our Daddy’s bottom line. So they did. Sold, the remaining four acres at cost, Daddy to the mob. And the mob built out our neighborhood east, one Italian palazzo after another. The Croc cared nothing for Dan’s simple pleasures. Hers was a life of calculated turns and twists. Her chicks had not yet entered the water, the river of life, or the life of the mind

  when she left.

  The “DAAAHndy.” At ninety, she still draws out the Texas “A,” relishes the describing of him, forgets she has never spoken of him this way tome. Sylvan had seen her one-woman exhibition. 1957. Havana. “Triumphant!” says The Miami Herald! “Visitò el Presidente la Sala de Arquitectura en Bellas Artes,” says the Diario de La Mañana of Fulgencio Batista’s visit to her show. Our heads almost touch as we study her picture in the paper. Happy in black silk, she is flanked by Captain, critics, and the American attaché. She is silent as I locate Sylvan in the crowd.

  He was forty-one

  when she met him. In 1959 he entered the Bauhaus. In 1960, he was a regular; he came with the art crowd, or alone; he strutted his stuff, was self-assured, and dismissive of our fragile ecosystem. He told the Croc, “I am your only peer.” Two against Three! You, Cicisbeo, you took her to her Lover. Three against Three! Then Sylvan drove west out of the pine forest, took the Red Road, not the Old Cutler Road, ignited scandal and scorched the heart of our Jewish community in Miami. He drove a Volkswagen bug. And she was in it.

  On the lam,

  Croc played out her fugitive life like a B movie. From the Red Road to the Dixie Highway and North to New York, she slipped out of our lives without a goodbye. She set up the Fugitive’s blind, then applied for divorce. At the end of their year in Europe,

  the court decided.

  She twisted the knife, my father’s wife. To my father, who would not rat on her, she never ceased to be the prettiest Jewish girl an officer could set eyes upon, his inspiration and motivation. Now he owed her cash. But his sex kept him curious and mobile and he moved on. He took us out of the pine forest.

  The New Yorker

  ran a Mother’s Day cartoon for its May issue. On the manicured lawn over tea cakes, one middle-class she-croc laments to another, same, “It’s days like today I regret having eaten my young.” What airs they brought to table. I laughed and thought, our Croc had no regrets. I laugh through tears. I begrudge her that more than anything else. We were expendable. She was free of us and we were free of her. But we did not want to be free. We were trapped in our freedom. We wanted avant-Ava in Batik, back in the Bauhaus, back in her studio, her back to the turpentine wall, her dark hair framed by Russian icons, Mexican masks, pre-Columbian figurines, just as we had known her; just as I see her, still, in a photo shot in Havana for her show. We wanted those ruby reds to call out our names in East Texas shrill, lips twisted in bemusement by the discomfort of our youth and our significant lack of everything to which she aspired. The Croc was thirty-six in 1961. The Play of the Weather was at her back; The Betrayal and The Abandonment were at her back. Today, she is more relaxed. She prattles on about her divorce, “my skAAAnndal,” she says, with that extra push of Southern airs. “He was a DAAAHndy.” At ninety her mind is clear, her eyes are blue, and now she is alone. There is much I do not know of her, or where this fawn will go.

  Croc’s voice

  roared through the mommyless ether of our universe taunting us, trapping us between past and present. We responded differently, Serafina and I. I locked my door, spurned the world, found comfort in a moral superiority destined to vindicate my isolation and preserve my dignity. I emerged alternately sullen and haughty, cynic and sarcast. I foraged for love in the petri dish of my underground. The world paid no attention to preteenage venom. But the ether did pay compliments in ways I was too young to understand. Life offered new perceptions, but see how I lose the tune in the telling of sensate events. This long drink of water underwent simultaneous wavelike and infinite expansions and infinite contractions. Inside my body and body inside out. The wave flowed inside the Bauhaus and beyond the Bauhaus. It was a seizure without the seizure. An epiphany while the mind was left in ignorance; it was terribly asexual too, in case you’re wondering. My eyes saw the single molecule that contained the universe. It lay outside of me. And it lay inside of me, expanding me to infinite size. The location was unremarkable, on the ceiling above a closet in my room. I had only to fix these eyes. Expansion. This much was clear, Cicisbay: My unruly emotions would not hinder me in the world. My body held answers to questions I had yet to formulate. Cynic and sarcast were silenced during metamorphosis from one to all. The mathematics of opposing forces resisted calculation. The gods, tired of hearing my filthy mouth, had killed me with the kindness of a curious silence for a few moments of the day.

  On the other hand,

  Seri’s journals confirm she actively sought love in the world. We fidgeted about an evanescent truce, suffered each the other, to sweeten the pie of childhood. No matter the conversation or the game or the clothes, it would end the same: her on bed, me on floor as crusty page to the young goddess. I scored the bottoms of her feet with two fingernails, navigating by the blinkered light of the upper left canine. Light indicated approval and I continued. If light disappeared, I changed position of those nails. Bored and happy and secure, I had no martial art or worthy thought to drop into the bucket of the world. No preparation or appointment whatever, except to tickle the blushed coral of her feet. She liked the feel of it. She liked the attention. She too experienced physical transports, but unlike me, she was comfortable expressing sexuality. I was a placeholder for someone in her future. Seri entered the night by natural inclination. Or, the night entered her. After dinner from age ten she was already rubbing her hips against the couch. The Croc, amused, would shrill out, “StoPP, with all thaaat Tooshie Bizness.” Seri stopped. The next night, she started. The Croc had called her out, betrayed her child in a series of small tremors before the great one. Fortunately,
croc-speak did not prove to be the organizing principle from which our later perceptions and thoughts would derive coherence and direction. The voice that nurtures chaos in the soul never is. After The Play of Our Abandonment, Seri and I wobbled with uncertainty around the same axis, though we did not know it at the time, nor did we recognize these early indicators of our characters as indicators of an aesthetics of art or a philosophy of life, say what?

  The Croc began to write to us

  from the shifting landscape of her new life. She requested we address her as “Mamán.” This added a certain continental je ne sais quoi to my childish letters from the swampland to a man’s apartment in Manhattan. “Chère Mamán,” began the new relationship. “Mommy” was lost forever. Lost, because you, Cicisbeo, had freed her from our trap.

  Blind in Granada, or, Romance

  Edie Meidav

  She was a bohemian girl with lots of life to live fast. Only in her early twenties but making up for time lost to who knows what. To books or the slow Cheshire-cat vanishing act effected by her best friend, a dreamy childhood with the wrong doors unlocked like her outsize painting ambition or the inability to trust those she knew, apart from her great-uncle of the round head and romantic aspiration who died but first told her in his French accent that he wanted to leave her a little money saved up from teaching so that when she found herself in the funeral-home room alone with his ethylated body he appeared to wink and say, go ahead now, enjoy yourself the way I always meant to. Her uncle who read books in many languages and taught English to foreign girl students from Asia while never forgoing his strong Sex Appeal cologne because how could he keep himself from falling in love with students to the point that the cashier at the local cinema knew him by the jokey line he used whenever he took a new one out: But are there greater discounts for the sexy senior citizens? He had gotten poorly embroiled with the last Korean student, one who would not so much as kiss him if he did not marry her, saying: The cow won’t give milk unless you feed it, this girl his greatest disappointment since only death separated him from the love he thought might one day still be his, the love first whispered by French poetry and later mouthed by smoke rings in American kisser films he’d managed to see back when some still called Zimbabwe the Belgian Congo. His real dream was to have become a painter in Tahiti. And so with her uncle’s sum of unused pleasure she planned to go to Europe because she too had read a book about an enchantress in Spain and a book about traveling boys and hijinks that made escaping the slate gray a correct course of action. And then everyone had told her stories about the Alhambra in Granada, saying so determinedly it really was the place she had to visit, a near peak of European civilization given that it was the last time so many ideologies about love and faith interpenetrated, such possibility flourishing in that moment if you could only travel back and alter later history in which all streams continued in their straitened way. But you must go to Granada, they chimed, while she kept opening her Spain guidebook to the quotation from the medieval king who said there is no pain worse than being blind in Granada and so it was confirmed, the message, especially as both her parents had started dwindling at the peripheries, a death moving toward the core: Clearly there was no pain worse than living life too slowly.

  Once there, she bought a small guitar from a courtly guitar maker who asked if she would like to come by some night despite his wife and colicky grandson, while also failing to know where someone could take guitar lessons authentic to Andalucía. Leaving the guitar maker’s small, cramped studio, carrying the guitar, she recalled a story she had read as a child about a happy pig named Pearl who found a magic bone, and was going to stop to get coffee on her way back to a hostel populated by Viking descendants but instead a gypsy intercepted her with his El Greco face, all massive, drooping eyes and aquiline nose as he unhanded her of the new guitar and started singing right there to her in the Plaza Mayor where she knew she had landed in the center of the thing she had envisioned but had not named.

  You have killed me with your walk, he sang, strumming her guitar, stretching it out—camino-o-o-o, making his chin wobble with each O. Behind each wobble lined up a gaggle of ancestors with the question of whether he could live up to them. He did his best. After his song was done he asked her with some seriousness to come live with him in the small cave up above where tourists walk, white dwelling caves honeycombed into the hills facing the Alhambra which perhaps a king had made as a testament of love to his wife, a story that endured in a way that made her question if she would ever really know what it meant to fall in love despite her schooling in all the songs, because what had she ever known? Granada was either stripping her bare or layering on a new scrim since she was feeling more or at least feeling someone else’s more. In most ways she was bad as the gypsy singing premature songs of love her way, the blinds of not truly seeing him, and it was not only risky but imaginary to throw yourself so in the thrall of someone else when anyway wasn’t it always chemical? She had been curious about people throwing their hats down before her but didn’t know if she had ever really thrown her hat down to someone or just to the sheer joy of their throwing their hats down. Was she to be so deprived of experience? Love, to love, to fall in love. She had climbed mountains but never fallen. Others had been obsessed, sometimes with her, and was she only to know escape and absconding? Yet what was the strange thrill of the gypsy singing to her? It had to do with all stories conjoining in a spot just above her navel as if she were not on the road seeking but at both source and end, inside a kaleidoscope. This itself is a story about the problem with the picturesque and how it links with the picaresque and how certain girls are prone to confusing the two, going out to wander the landscape with something like one of Claude Lorrain’s mirrors turned backward at the landscape. If something seems correct enough in its set details they forgive enough to think here lies fulfillment until fulfillment itself gives them the lie.

  At night the gypsy and she did the deed, only one of them blushing in the dark on the floor in the gypsy cave though somewhere she was also numb because she didn’t stop to ask what, for all that singing about her eyes and voice, her smile and a chance at amor, amor, what about him was fulfillment? She had chosen this, it was no rape, he was dead center with her but was there any vastness other than mammal embrace or the satisfaction of being in a cave with an avatar of Granada reaming her out of thinking? There was a mystery they tried to extract out of the other, one she would never solve, his animal breath in her ear, her face on the stone floor, the two of them more ancient because of the Alhambra beyond the window, timeless. Happy to swallow him in, this smooth genie, imagining him her conqueror while at the same time being the filmgoer curious about what the next scene in the movie will bring. She almost knew enough to name it but still woke the next morning inquisitive about life, her cheery guitar next to her in its opened blue plush case, one she loved as it also seemed to promise an interesting future. The gypsy took her to a special tetería where they sat on beaded pillows and he drank Moroccan tea broken only by song when he needed to illustrate a point about love, attachment, loss. What did they talk about? Guitars, his family, I love you so, singing like an animal in full display, throat full, eyes flashing. Midday they went to see his stern aunt rehearsing and there encountered the source of the wobble, the severe mannerism demonstrated by his own romantic uncle. To sing gypsy guitar, you had to hurt and when you hurt most you were to open your mouth wide and let out the longing she had read about, duende another flame over centuries. How good to hurt and know loss, to feel passion-ion-ion, tremble, vibrato, melisma, words that appeared in the girl’s head like keepsakes
from another realm. There she was deep in the cave with the gypsy family, a dusty moment out of time only she got to applaud since no one had any idea where she was. While no one in the gypsy caves seemed surprised to see her and such lack of surprise almost traveled far enough to create belonging. She had come along, toting her guitar as both a coin of the realm and earnest passport, something they had never seen held by a tourist. The aunt happened to be a beautiful narrow stern bird skilled in fortunetelling. She put her hands on the girl’s rib cage and waist to calibrate the instrument: You would be good, she determined. At first the girl thought good at baby production but the aunt knew the question had arisen and spoke over her shoulder. A good dancer, she said dismissively, meaning the girl lagged only a few centuries behind. Was this then the story the girl was in, in which she would learn to be a flamenquera from this stern woman who brooked no fools? Good at dancing and fallen in love? Late afternoon the gypsy brought her to the small blue-painted subterranean room, blue to keep away the evil eye, in which perhaps his mother lived with his older sister and a bunch of children with parentage impossible to align and the gypsy’s mother grew keen on telling her all the grimy details of one granddaughter’s illness with such compelling force that her eyes barred all new stories. Within such chaos she was capable of fixing on the one tale with its point shriveling away, one the girl felt she almost reached but did not. No es comprensible, she wanted to say, instead saying, yes, claro, I understand. Afterward, along the road back to the gypsy’s little cave, he beckoned her to stop at a small counter of a restaurant where they shared a cheese sandwich as if already a couple with life behind and ahead, having shared and continuing to share. He would wear his wifebeater T-shirt, his skin glossy under her fingertips. Later with her useful waist she would dance for his aunt but really for him and on her epitaph you could read about acceptance, belonging, having traveled far from your original ideas. When it came time to pay for the meal, she told the counterboy, another cousin of the gypsy, that it was her gift. As if on cue the gypsy unrolled a song about how he could never thank her for the brightness of her eyes, a song perhaps made up on the spot despite the legacy of the chin wobble. In the full of afternoon they went back to his cave in theory to put her guitar down but more to lie once more on the floor of the cave and spill acrid red wine from a leather bota into their mouths before entangling, rectangles of sun stretched long over skin, his chest almost a smooth boy’s though light caught the end of each hair, her foreigner’s hand rippling over the brilliance. You will learn guitar well, he said, laughing. Did a bubble of a question start in her throat then? When they were done, she emerged into an unusual hour, everything lit from within, little fairy lights popping on, strung up outside the white-plastered cave doors facing the Alhambra, the palace tucked into its hillside just as they were tucked into theirs, with everyone along the gypsies’ winding cobblestoned road up the mountain knowing flamenco was good business. Produce romance for people and they get happy, said her gypsy, plus they pay more. Every little cave they passed had candlelit tables for two. Candles are important! he started to sing, hand on the back of her neck where only an hour earlier he had been holding her down. Now she knew he was making everything up in the received mode, his family singing him as it had sung for generations while she felt so moorless. As the sun sank behind the Alhambra, the tourists started to rise in an obedient swell, twos, fours, family units up into the arc of romance, craning their necks, and through their eyes she saw the charm of the day lit up almost too garishly, the glowing white of the caves and she in it with them, able to see what the tourists saw as much as what the gypsies did, the double frame giving her courage less about some story and more about this life of hers at this center, not skulking to the fringe of things, this knowledge being what she might claim. All this had happened in little more than a day. Her insides sore but in a good way, the tiredness under her eyes carrying everyone else’s reportage but she no longer had to tote around the contours of herself. The gift the gypsy had given her was dissolving a bit and she wished to help the cause of dissolution by welcoming the craning tourists into the aunt’s cave while standing aside so as not to take a seat from paying customers while the stern bird began her dance, heels tatting the pulse while the tragic face twisted to tell of horror, loss, and union so doomed you too lived at the molten core. The gypsy played with his uncle and because this time the uncle gave his all, the gypsy did too, fusing in music so that the tourists shivered in the cave because they too lived at the heart of experience, Spain, the Roma. After, she helped fold seats and then went back to a different uncle of the gypsy’s and until late, for free, for no other outsider but her, bands of gypsies drank and sang, making ribald, inclusive comments that named her almost an honorary man due to foreigner status, one of few women in that room, so many rough hands placed over hers to teach her guitar, because she was the ilk of girl who was going to learn flamenco guitar. The next morning by some arrangement she did not quite understand they went to some other uncle’s cave, bigger and better whitewashed, where the uncle told her he was the last of a rare kind of fortuneteller while her gypsy stood by. The uncle explained that he needed to look right below her breasts to determine her fortune and because she was so very much mid-experience she lay on the table, shirt off, letting the uncle tell her fortune from small invisible marks he could ascertain only if he got close enough to either kiss or scrutinize her skin, all while her gypsy stood looking out the door with his face telegraphing an important errand he had almost forgotten and in this the question in her throat grew, she wanted to ask something but had no clue how to form it.