Monoceros

by Suzette Mayr

  A poster of Colonel Shakira.

  — What do you take in your coffee? asks Crêpe Suzette, clinking about in the kitchen. Max straightens his tie. The stale cigarette smell in the apartment tickles his nostril hairs. He aligns the skinny tip of his tie directly beneath the fat tip.

  — Tell me how much I owe you and I’ll write the cheque, he says.

  — Cream and sugar it is, says Crêpe Suzette. She sits down in another whoosh of hairspray. Her tight gold uniform outlining her muscled thighs as she pours cream into his coffee, then crosses her legs. Her eyebrows plucked into lean Marlene Dietrich arches. Her wig Shakira perfect. — You can make out the cheque to Clement Michaels. $2,495.62 .

  Max sitting so stiffly, he will permit nothing in this apartment to touch him, not one thing.

  — Waitasec, says Shakira. — Are you trying to tell me something? Are you bankrupt or something? I knew I should have made you bring cash. Fuck, I knew it. Fuck.

  — No, says Max. — No, that’s not it.

  — Oh.

  Max fishes a tissue from his pocket and wipes his nose.

  — Well, I don’t take Visa. Is it the coffee?

  Max pulls his tie loose with his finger. Then tightens the knot. Then straightens the tips. Clears his throat.

  — Did someone break your heart, honey? asks Suzette, putting her hand on his knee. — You look like your best friend got sent on a three-decade cycle to the Andromeda Galaxy.

  Max unfolds a cheque from his wallet and, smoothing it out on his knee, he writes $2,495.62 over to a Mr. Clement Michaels.

  — Excellent, says Suzette. She folds the cheque exactly in two and tucks it into her cleavage. — Just kidding, she says, opening a drawer in the blonde desk and tossing it in. — Now tell me. I can always recognize the fellow wounded.

  Max takes a strained sip of coffee.

  — Who will I tell? asks Suzette. — Come on. I have credentials. I once dated a shrink. Turns out, they hang out in packs.

  — Can I smoke in here? asks Max. — Can I have my identification and credit cards back, please?

  — Only if you give me a cigarette too, she says.

  He flicks the lighter under the end of her cigarette. They both suck.

  — Can I have some more sugar please?

  She passes him a small white bowl. — Of course you can, Suzette purrs.

  — Can I have my identification and credit cards please?

  — Of course you can. As soon as you tell me why you’re so sad.

  A lock of Max’s perfectly white hair falls into his eyes as he puffs on his cigarette, shields his eyes with one hand. Clement Michaels’s Starship Monoceros perfection makes him want to cry.

  Suzette has sworn to herself she will stay away from married men and closet cases. But this one is a chocolate bean with a brandy centre, a bottle of Veuve Clicquot asking to be popped, now that she finally has her money and can appreciate the finer things. She blows her smoke sideways, away from this poor, crumbling, handsome heap of a man.

  — A boy in my school… where I’m a principal…killed himself. And my roommate has left me because of it. I don’t understand the connection, but it’s still breaking me in two.

  — I remember you, she says.

  — Pardon?

  She does remember him from one of her shows. He was the one whose foot she held in her hand for longer than usual, so startled was she by his pulse beating like a trapped bird’s, fluttering in her fingers. She had never seen a man so terrified, so she had to leave the closet case with the gorgeous white hair alone and go for his giggling bald dad instead. The gay guy gasping and struggling like a man caught in an avalanche, his foot encased in a sexy argyle sock.

  His argyle socks. She can still smell his panic coating her hands.

  She had not seen someone so terrified in a long time, and while she held his damp argyled foot in her hand she wished she could have taken him in her arms and said You’re home now, his body relaxing against her. Come out of that closet, baby, the air’s so bright and disco out here.

  Suzette puts a hand on the poor man’s knee. — Now why would your boyfriend leave you because of that? she asks. — It wasn’t your fault the boy killed himself ? I think my niece goes to your school.

  — That’s impossible, says Max. — I didn’t do what I could, frankly. And neither did Walter. And now he’s left me.

  — So that boy’s killing you now too, says Suzette.

  — You’re only a character from a TV show, Max responds. His head droops.

  She wishes she could have bought that poor dead boy, another soldier fallen in battle, a Crab Nebula cocktail. She wishes she wishes she could tell him to look into the music, look into the lights and feel the cosmos right there, right in his hands and shining down on to his baby head. She wishes she could have told him there was a world full of men hiding in waiter yawns and downtown pubs and night-school hallways and grocery-store aisles and next-door apartments. And that he would meet every one of them if he just hung around long enough.

  She moves to sit beside Max until their thighs are touching, his mildewy smell right next to her face. She takes his head to her bosom. Props her chin in his hair. His hair thick, oily. Max refusing to exhale.

  — I think I know a place where we can go, she whispers.

  — Oh, Colonel, he sighs.

  Max drives Crêpe Suzette in the mechanic’s car to her club — tonight is a special corporate gig— down dry, tight streets that hold their breath, waiting for green leaves, flower buds. She is scooched into the passenger seat in her fur coat, a plastic rain bonnet over her hair to keep her ’do in place, her long hands folded in her lap. She sings softly as he switches lanes, meticulously shoulder-checks to show her what a good driver he is. Suzette sings ‘Do You Know the Way to San José?’ and ‘Hey Big Spender.’ She asks for a song request. Max can’t think of a single song, his head suddenly Ikea-pine clean of ideas, and all he can hear is the clicking of the turn signal, the air blasting from the heater into their faces. Suzette finally says she’ll sing the theme song from Sector Six, — No such thing as heroes, she sings. In the signal-clicking, engine-revving silence following the last note, Max nearly slams the car into a sound barrier lining the road.

  — You don’t like that song? asks Suzette.

  — Here we are, he says huskily, pulling the car up in front of the club’s awning. She fumbles for the door handle.

  — Let me get that, he says, and he hurries out of the car and leaps over a heap of blackened snow, melted into honeycomb. He tugs open her door and offers her his hand.

  — My very own chauffeur, she says, as she steps out of the car.

  — Well, he says, her hand still in his. The long curls of her fingernails rest against his palm.

  — So I’ll cash that cheque tomorrow, she says. — If it bounces, I’ll bounce you. Maybe I’ll bounce you anyway.

  Max holds the club door open for Suzette. Inside, it is hot and dry.

  — So you’ll stay and see the show? she asks. — I can get you a seat where no one can see you.

  — Love it! he blurts. When the alarm clock bludgeons him awake tomorrow, he will be performing in his own sorry show, the sleep-deprivation show, the fourteen-cups-of-coffee show, but so what if tonight’s a school night? So what?

  — Come in, she says. — Get yourself a drink, and we’ll get you settled.

  His parents will not believe his luck, scoring a free ticket to a Galaxy Lounge show. If he were living a normal life, he would call them up to brag. Walter would laugh if he knew Max was here, on his own, in his parents’ favourite place.

  — There’s a special person in the audience tonight, booms Suzette into the mic.

  The blood in Max’s head rushes to the floor.

  — My mother’s here tonight, folks! Give her a hand!

  The audience scatter-claps. Max sits back up, claps, then jingles the keys in his pocket.

  — It’s my drag mother, for fuck’s sak
e, I think you can make more fucking noise than that! she shouts.

  The audience’s clapping more boisterous, a short whoooop! from the back.

  Max is a little disappointed when she changes out of her gold Shakira catsuit into a minidress dangling all over with gold coins, but she is still breathtaking and huge, yes, he has to admit she is the biggest, most formidable woman he has ever seen.

  Crêpe Suzette, Vaseline Dion and Miss Demeanour in matching gold-coin dresses fouetté around a giant leopard stiletto in the centre of the stage. They fouetté until Suzette positions her buttocks on the stiletto’s lip, crosses her legs, and Max has a brief glance under her skirt, but it is so dark she could have the Milky Way tucked under there. Max sips at his club soda; the music and the beauty, he’s in a risqué Berlin club in the 1920s. He can understand how a beautiful woman, carrying a white rose dipped in chloroform and ether, could seduce a whole room. He has to piss, but he doesn’t want to miss a single song.

  — Forgive me, father, for I have sinned, pronounces Suzette, — It has been twenty-five years since my last confession. Father, I— I— I— I have a foot fetish!

  A cymbal crashes.

  Suzette fingers socked feet, her terrifying sock inspection, so Max runs on his toes to the bathroom. He can hear the audience laughing, the music, and her voice belting out — Straight! Straight! Gay! Straight! and more laughing from the audience. He pisses at a urinal even though he no longer has to go, and washes his hands. He stands just behind the door in the bathroom, the black veneer, the glow from the lights around the mirrors above the sinks. The entire bathroom is black, with chrome and mirror accents. Reminds him of the room that held the coffins when he went with his parents to select his great-aunt’s coffin. The poor attempt to disguise the facts with dark wood panelling, soft lighting and flowers. He jingles the keys in his pocket. He pulls off his blazer, and drapes it over his arm. Another musical interlude begins— she sings ‘Do You Know the Way to San José?’ this time at full volume— and he pushes open the door. He stumbles on the way to his seat, but quickly rights himself.

  Crêpe Suzette flashes her pantyhosed bum at the audience and trash-talks the men lined up at the front tables like a row of crows. Their wives laugh, all lipstick, fingernails and tooth veneers, the men laugh and ram their hairy knuckles in the air in triumph when Suzette spontaneously humps one of their thighs, kisses the tops of all their heads. Maybe Max is starting to understand his parents’ love for these kinds of shows, how hilarious they thought it was to dress up as the opposite sex for Halloween parties. His father in a blonde ringleted wig that lurched to the side whenever he turned his head too quickly, his mother in a tuxedo with her hair stuffed up into a top hat, her upper lip drawn with a moustache that curled at the ends. They would scream with laughter as his father pulled the dress down over hisshoulders and his mother zipped the back; his mother stuffing a pair of balled-up socks down the front of her pants. His father’s thin lips stippled crimson, long false eyelashes curling up from under his bristling eyebrows. A heart-shaped mole glued on his jaw. His mother lowering her voice and ordering Max’s father to fetch her a beer, woman. Max knows they aren’t homosexuals or perverts. Walter calls them the Nutty McNuttersons. Walter.

  And now Walter has left Max, as though Walter asked him to dance, then foxtrotted away with someone else.

  Max is pretending to his secretary, Joy, to his vice-principals, to the other teachers, that Walter’s having Max’s photo on his desk is as natural as the Hang In There kitten posters that pepper the bulletin boards in the school. He shrugs when they ask him, says he has other more important issues to think about. Like the shrinking budget.

  Will Max have to fire Walter?

  The evening and a good night’s sleep dribbling away in this demented place.

  And, come to think of it, as he fingers his lighter, his keys, watches a guy — can’t be younger than seventy — slurping a shooter out of Suzette’s mouth, maybe he doesn’t really understand what this audience is doing, why they are so giddy, so gay, why this kind of thing makes his parents laugh themselves apoplectic, his mother once literally rolling on her back on the floor at the sight of his father in her wedding dress. He thought at the time it was the music — the Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli impersonations are the closest they will ever get to breathing the same air as Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli. These are all middle-aged people and older. What fallen garden is this? Who is he, biting into these fruits? He isn’t exactly heterosexual, Max knows that, but he isn’t some old queen either. Maybe he is relieved that Walter’s left. He is spliced and splayed open, his organs naked, here in this raucous dark. He just wants to drive Suzette home as he promised, then drive himself home and bury himself in his own bed, in his own blankets, or switch on the television. Sector Six. Colonel Shakira would never let Lieutenant Fong drink a shooter from her mouth, no matter what drug a Reptiloid might have sneaked into their electromagnetic-generated beverage. He paid Suzette — not Suzette, Clement — the money Max owed him her him.

  Max buttons on his coat in the steamy darkness. Jingles the keys, the lighter in his pocket. Takes a last pull from his drink.

  — You’re still here, she says, her forehead and neck shining with sweat. — I thought for sure you’d beamed out of here.

  Max wants Suzette to throw him to the floor and leap on him in that horrible, sinful way that would enrage the parents at his school, force his resignation, strip away his pension, his reputation, and make him live the rest of his life on his gravedigger savings, him and his illegal lust. Spend his after life in hell.

  — I promised I’d drive you home, says Max. He smiles. His breath thick with almost half a pack of cigarettes, cigarette smoke woven into his clothes. He smoked with each of the waiters as they came out for their separate smoke breaks. They talked about traffic tickets.

  What his body lusts for more than anything right at this moment, even more than Suzette, than Walter that Judas, that slut, is to lay himself down in cool, freshly dug night soil, and let the earth open its arms and swallow him back down to where he came from.

  Eighth Monday After Furey

  Gretta

  Since your son died, your studio has lain fallow, a button depressed and the entire room a secret behind an empty wall. Your husband retreats to the television, the refrigerator packed with glass, plastic and rubberized containers bloated with food. The multitudinous flower petals curled and brown, the water in the clear vases mucus-thick. The television murmuring and hissing from your husband’s den, the aroma of your husband’s pot licking the back of your throat.

  You open the door to your studio and you smell the sawdust, drying paint. Your old perfume that makes you gasp.

  The envelope in your pocket; inside it, locks of your baby’s hair clasped in ribbons and string, two scattered baby teeth and that girly locket. The locket not given to you, but it’s yours, a metal heart the size of a peach pit the last thing to nestle against his breaths. You bring the locks of hair up to your nose. One from when he was first born, the second from his first birthday, the third from the birthday after that. The last lock of the collection because by three years and one day old, he had already started running away from you.

  Begin.

  You twist his hair and fine silver wire into flower petals, a tiny molar glued into the centre of the flower. You will make two of these, one for you, one for his father, and then you will have run out of your son.

  His father in his cubby, the TV blaring. He folds his legs away to make room for you on the couch, one arm triangled behind his head, his eyes withered slits— your lover a hundred years old. You tuck up the seat of your work overalls and sit. You hand him a hair flower, he hands you his joint; you note the smoke curling upward from his long fingers. You suck in the smoke, the cherry burning only centimetres away from your lips. Your husband sniffs the flower. A spaceship in a galaxy far far away hovers on the TV screen, the stars peppering the background one mighty cons
tellation. You suck in more smoke. The plinks of a TV piano, the low strains of a cello. A flower twisting in your other hand.

  Gabe

  Because the silence this second Monday night without his boy is the longest sustained cacophony the father has ever heard, he covers his ears when it wails too close, acoustic waves pulverizing his eardrums, stones flung at him, the silence so loud it crushes, buries him. Sometimes in the thudding, the mangling silence, he cannot help wondering if his boy is cold where he is now, what if he’s freezing? Does he have his coat? The father has answered the door at every bing-bong of the doorbell, he is never surprised by what he finds when he opens the door, only one thing would surprise him. He has microwaved plates and plates of spooned casserole, brewed litres of coffee and tea for his wife, written eulogies, obituaries, kept the radio on for days, its buzzing and tinkling, chattering, hissing music strangling notes through the tiny holes in the speakers, and finally Monday night the silence wins, he cannot hear anymore, his eardrums played until they’ve broken, the milky radio voices, the monochrome music, the bing-bong, the microwave beep beep smothered by his boy’s absence. The sharpened silence splintering his bones.

  Monday nights before the unsayable event, his boy’s television show swallowed the house with its racket and braying.