by Stuart Dybek
“You may have noticed we have different thought processes,” she said.
“How so?”
“I love the connections, the overview of novels. And you … you think that life is a Great Moments collection. Look at all these undernourished-looking books of poetry,” she said, gesturing to where my typewriter sat on the platform I’d erected on the worn carpet from a stack of library books. “How can you type sitting on the floor, anyway?”
“I’m living my life like a haiku,” I said. “Syllable by syllable.”
“The best teacher I ever had in high school once wrote on one of my papers ‘Sarcasm is the final defense of the weak.’ And this saxophone—do you ever play it or is it just for decor?”
“I’m practicing to be a musician of silence,” I told her, quoting a line I’d read just the night before in a book of translations of Mallarmé.
She merely gave me one of those looks that says if there’s one thing more tedious than being a bore it’s being a pretentious asshole.
I knew she was impressed.
We’d met in the New World, a socialist bookstore that had just moved up to Rogers Park after a mail bomb had blown out the windows in its former downtown location. Stosh, who frequented the place, had told me that the owner, Lew Merskin, had fought in the Spanish Civil War. I’d wandered in on the evening of the first day I’d moved back to the city, and meeting her there seemed like a good omen.
Her name was Melody—but after our discussion about life as a Russian novel, I began calling her Natasha, a name she seemed fond of. She had the soulful eyes to carry it off, though that quality might have been enhanced by her violet eye shadow. Her face was framed by dark hair, wisps of which she constantly brushed away from her eyes and away from our mouths when we kissed.
I didn’t have a phone and would never know when she was coming over, or if she was coming at all. The day we’d met I’d told her where I was living, never expecting her to drop by, especially when she didn’t even offer her phone number. All she’d told me was that she lived in Evanston.
Later, she mentioned that she was attending Northwestern, which I’d assumed, somehow, but I never found out where she was living, whether alone or with a boyfriend, in a dorm, or at a sorority house she was embarrassed about. Or was she slumming and didn’t want her friends to know? Once, when I asked her how I could get in touch, she said, “Let’s just leave it this way for a while—both free, okay?”
“Fine by me,” I said.
The lobby buzzer didn’t work. I lived on the top floor, down a dingy corridor dark with burned-out overhead bulbs. There’d be a knock at my door—I never quite learned to recognize her knock—and a chemical change too immediate to control would surge through me. If it turned out to be merely one of my friends, Stosh or Doolin, I’d feel foolish standing there at the door with a pounding heart. But sometimes, usually in midafternoon when she’d cut class and take the train from Evanston, it would be Melody, looking Natasha-like in the black raincoat she wore whether it was raining or not. Jeans or a denim skirt, blouse opened at the throat, and underneath a colored bra—violet, ivory, mint, smoke, rose, Capri. A bra from what she referred to as her Italian underwear hobby, which she blamed on the corrupting childhood experience of collecting wardrobes for her Barbie. Whatever the color of the day, she took to dangling her bras from my saxophone as if it was a coatrack, not a horn.
When the flop-out bed would begin twanging melodiously beneath us, the old woman in the apartment below would beat the ceiling with what I guessed was the handle of a broom.
“I wonder what chapter she’s on?” I said.
“That’s sad, not funny,” Natasha said.
“At least my typing late at night never seems to bother her.”
“And what is it that you’re typing so late?”
“Maybe my diary.”
“Oh really, and do you write about us? About this? How do you describe it?”
“Well, I usually start out, ‘Dear Diary …’”
“I wouldn’t know what words to use,” she said. “Certainly not the clinical ones, but not the dirty ones either. And certainly not the bodice rippers. Throb or tumescent—God, that’s truly disgusting.”
“I thought diaries were supposed to be private, like confession.”
“No fair. I share my stories with you.”
It was true, she’d tell me stories—strange, amazing stories like the one about her first real sexual experience, when she was a freshman in high school, in a suburb outside Cleveland. It happened with a young man named Armando, who was painting the condo where she lived with her family. Not that she and Armando actually did anything much but talk, she explained, but the things they talked about were a sin. Simply talking with Armando was more intensely erotic than what she called mashing, which came later with high school boys. He was the first man who made her realize that men could be beautiful, and once she saw that, Armando was all she could think about.
He’d tease her, refer to her as Lolita or Ms. Jailbait, and then his voice would drop and he’d begin a litany of what he’d like to do if she were legal. Once, when he was painting the inside hallway, she brought him an ice-cold Coke and he climbed down from his ladder—the way she described it made it sound like Michelangelo descending from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—and took a long swig, then kissed her with his ice-cold lips. It was the first kiss for which she opened her mouth. Lips still cool, he kissed her throat and down her body. It was summer, she was dressed in a halter top and shorts.
“If you were a woman, this is how I’d kiss your breasts,” Armando said, kissing gently through her clothes. “And this is how I’d kiss you here,” he said, sliding to his knees.
“Jeez, what a pervert,” I said.
There was more. She woke the last morning the painters were there to find that Armando had lowered the scaffold outside to the level of her bedroom window. He perched there, five stories up, looking in. “I was watching you sleep,” he said. She remembered that she was wearing shorty pajamas of a nearly transparent cotton.
“What would you do now if I wasn’t here?” he asked.
She stood before the window, yawned, stretched, and then unbuttoned her pajama top.
“I am a woman,” she told him.
“Thank you,” Armando whispered. “I’ll always remember you in the morning light.” Then, he reached in past her curtains with his paintbrush and very lightly drew a streak of white paint down her chest.
She stood for what seemed an hour under the shower letting the water slowly wear the paint from her skin.
All through her next year in high school, she told me, she’d unexpectedly feel that streak of paint, and feel the almost irrepressible urge to open her blouse and see if it had reappeared—an urge so strong that if she was in class she’d slip her fingers between the buttons, touch her skin, and check her fingertips for paint. And if she was at home, she’d stand before the mirror and unbutton her blouse, pretending that Armando was at the window, watching her.
Sometimes, looking into the mirror, she told me, she’d be startled to notice that tears were running down her face.
“Why were you crying?” I asked.
“Because I’d heard that while painting another building Armando fell to his death.”
Probably peeping at someone, paintbrush in one hand and dick in the other, he lost his balance, I wanted to say.
And I might have, had I already heard her other stories.
They were all about firsts: that first real sexual experience, with Armando; the first time naked with a boy in a hotel room (that was at the state forensic finals in Dayton, and the boy, a forensic powerhouse known and feared as Motormouth, turned out to be more awkward and shy than she was); first time with a woman—Maria, a defector from Hungary, who was hired as the gymnastics coach at the all-girl Catholic high school during Melody’s junior year there, which, in a weird way, led to her first time with a divorced man—the Laingian psychotherapist t
o whom she was sent during the scandal about the gymnastics coach, which had ensued after Melody’s mother read the diary in which Melody recorded the entire lesbian encounter with Maria from the date of their first seemingly innocent back rubs.
After that, Melody stopped keeping a diary.
There was a price to pay in all her stories. The therapist, she said, simply went missing one day—later they learned he’d disappeared into a religious cult—and the overmatched naked boy in the hotel room won state and went on to nationals, only to crack during the finals and attempt suicide.
“What about that teacher who wrote about sarcasm on your paper?”
“What about him?”
“Did he die, too?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Accidents, death, deportation, disappearances, madness, suicide, and all that before Chapter One. Some prologue. It doesn’t bode well for me.”
“I wouldn’t worry,” she said. “You’re obviously a survivor.”
“I’m just glad it’s a novel and not a diary we’re talking about.”
“I guess I shouldn’t have told you.”
“Hey, I never said I didn’t like listening to your stories.”
“I’m sure. What’s to like anyway?”
“I like the line from your high school teacher. I like the one about how, after the first time a girlfriend described oral sex to you, you had a dream about it so intense you woke and, gymnast that you were, tried having auto-oral sex.”
“I told you that?”
“Remember? That afternoon I had the jug of Paisano courtesy of my friend Doolin?”
“Damn that Doolin and his Paisano! Sicilian LSD. God! Why do I tell you such things?”
“To drive me crazy?”
There’d been a knock one night, too late to be Melody. A little late even for Stosh.
When I opened the door, Doolin, returned from Europe, stood there holding two enormous jugs of Paisano the way a traveler stands balanced between suitcases.
“I heard you were back,” he said, stepping in, looking around appraisingly. “Very minimal, very understated.”
“I’ll give you the grand tour: and this is the kitchen.”
“A little breezy, no? But I love the way that tree branch is growing in through the window. Good place to hang your hat.”
Which, in Doolin’s case, was a beret. His worn gray corduroys were now supported by a pair of green suspenders. He’d only just returned to Chicago himself, he said. Europe had wiped him out financially, and for the time being he was living at his mother’s.
“Man, you should of come,” he said. “You’d have loved it. Winding cobbled streets out of a Pisarro painting. You got any glasses around here?”
“They’re on back order.”
We sat, backs to the wall beside the window, passing the gal-Ion jug of thick, dark Paisano. With each swig, wine dribbled down Doolin’s red beard and beaded off the chin hairs onto the frayed collar of his shirt. He was telling me about Paris, about visiting Debussy’s house off the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, as I’d asked him to; and he’d gone to Debussy’s grave as well, at the cemetery at Passy, and left a flower for me. Then, after Paris, it was on to Rome, riding the train that runs along the coast past Nice, and Bordighera—names of fantasy places picked up from the paintings we’d stood before at the Art Institute, breathing as if we could inhale their atmosphere.
“I got off at Rapallo because Pound went crazy there.”
Outside, an El streamed by, a strip of blue-lit film.
It was on the train through Italy, Doolin said, after the stop at Rapallo, that the flash of a single word came to him like a revelation and he realized it was the name of a literary magazine that he had to start: Obscurity.
“Hmmmmm,” I said, but not enthusiastically enough.
“You don’t think Obscurity says it all?” Doolin asked. “What’s missing? That certain je ne sais quoi?”
I shrugged. We’d been drinking excitedly, too fast, but still weren’t halfway through the first jug, though it had grown easier to heft. “What are you working on?” I asked, changing the subject.
“Mayakovsky,” Doolin said, “A Cloud in Trousers. A new translation for our generation.”
Back braced against the wall, he slid up to a standing position to recite, the slightest hint of a Russian accent edging into his voice:
The world breaks into a cold sweat
when I roll out of bed and bellow,
I’m twenty-two.
Get off the street, motherfuckers.
“That’s Mayakovsky?”
“Is now.” He unzipped his fly and took a leak out the window. “Very convenient setup you have here, Perry,” he said and began pacing.
When I stood, the Paisano hit me, and I could see why Doolin was pacing. It kept him from staggering. He paced to the typewriter on the living room floor, ripped out the sheet I’d been typing when he knocked, and read aloud in the booming Welshinflected tones of a Dylan Thomas record:
Chapter 1: You, me, a secret concealed like a baloney-and-cheese sandwich smuggled in a secretary’s purse as she rides the express to work, something she wants to devour now, that makes waiting for lunch impossible—I’m famished like that, or as you say ravished, when you mean ravenous, and lunch turns out to be a kiss that leaves a speck of mustard on your lips …
“Perfect for Obscurity,” Doolin said. “I’ll be your first publisher. You’ll be in good company with Mayakovsky.”
We slammed out of my door and with what was left in the first jug of Paisano sloshing between us staggered down the back stairs and out the alley entrance. The pavement seemed unsteady, pitted like the face of the moon; the alley, a narrow Parisian back street—the rue de Lune. A glint beneath a streetlight caught my eye.
“A good-luck penny!” I said, stooping for it. “One cent closer to making the rent.” A Rasputin-looking Lincoln stared up from my palm.
“Let’s make a wish,” Doolin said and grabbed, knocking the coin from my hand. We watched it roll along the gutter and down a sewer.
On Columbia Beach, whitecaps blew in, atomized spindrift misted like drizzle above the breakwater. We passed the Paisano, having to yell over the racket of waves. Wine and words both tasted of grit. “Who’s the woman in Chapter One?” Doolin shouted.
“A gymnast named Natasha. She defected … from Ohio.”
“I got it!” Doolin cried.
“Got what?”
“Obscurity and a Penny.”
“You said,” she wrote to me one day, “that you won’t feel you really live here until you get a letter. Will a story about a journey to which a woman has become somewhat addicted do? I could draw a map with the stops at the stations along her way: Howard, Jarvis, Morse—good English butler names—but a map wouldn’t tell how far she really travels, or how it feels to wait at the edge of sunlight on a wooden platform in the company of pigeons to board the train.
“Hello again, she tells the pigeons. Hello again, she tells herself.
“Picture the shades along the route in the apartment buildings that face the tracks, all drawn, golden in the sun, no other window standing open like yours. It’s two in the afternoon and the city feels almost deserted, everyone at work or school, and here she is alone on an Indian summer day, coat off, a lilac bra visible through her white blouse, which is reflecting light like a golden shade. Usually you raise it slowly, but sometimes let it fly from your hand.
“She never goes the back-alley way, even though she believed it when you told her that it’s a Paris street by night. She’s loyal to the way she came the first time, when she felt a little lost. Can you imagine what she felt—the crazy chance she was taking?
“Do you believe she actually came—walked past the phantom doorman, past the desk clerk, who, if there was one, would be dressed in black like the desk clerk in ‘Heartbreak Hotel’—you know, the one who’s ‘been so long on lonely street’ he’ll never come back. And the bel
lboy in his little suit would be a wizened old man by now.
“The dusty lobby doesn’t need phantoms, it has gutted mailboxes instead. You complain that you never get any mail. Could it be that’s because you haven’t bothered to tape your name to one of those mailboxes still scrawled with the names and numbers of people who lived here years ago? If you had a mailbox, you’d find this there, rather than slipped under your door.
“She climbs the stairs with their carpeting worn from countless footsteps, some of them hers from earlier visits, and makes her way down a corridor that’s dark even in midday. Do you believe this story—you who were so worried to find yourself in Chapter One, as though beginnings aren’t always the best part?
“Consider this a letter, although it’s turning into a flashback. Doesn’t every novel need one? Do you have them after she’s gone? What words do you use to describe the two of them when you think of times together like that afternoon it stormed?
“This flashback is like a déjà vu I have each time I climb the stairs again: an image of that woman, standing as she did the first time, wondering whether to knock, listening at your door. On the other side she can hear wind, an El train going by, chiming bells, an interval of silence played by a saxophone at rest.”
The afternoon it stormed, it seemed as if we were able to make the rain go faster. Her moans like a countdown; her lilac-painted fingernails pinching her pink nipples. Had she painted them to match her bra?
There seemed always something new to invent between us; even after she’d gone there was always one more thing I wanted to tell her.
I wanted to tell her what I’d heard on the night it turned cold—the kind of crisp, breath-steaming cold that I’d sometimes tried to imagine during days back at the foundry in Memphis. In summer, the workday there would begin at five in the morning, an attempt to deal with the heat; by nine we’d be popping salt tablets.
Shivering on the flop-out bed, wound in the bedspread, I was trying to read to the sound of Mr. Davi, the Albanian janitor, who labored to get the heat going. I pictured him in the furnace room whacking with a crowbar, as if he could beat the stubborn old furnace into action. On one occasion when I’d been doing my laundry in the basement, Davi showed me his collection of the flotsam he’d skimmed from the garbage he hauled—skin magazines, compromising photographs, torn panty hose. Having shared this confidence, he wanted to know about college girls.