I Smell Esther Williams

by Mark Leyner

  You’re a real woman, a kind of lusting dionysian midget-wrestler nymphomaniac who leaks like an idling chevy malibu, you’re like game fowl, bark gum, venison, buffalo, you’re like a beef cannoli. But there’s a murderer in your station wagon, and his skull is a ballroom with a chorus girl inside, and his heart is a gnarled bladder, and tonight you will suffocate in the warmth of his yellow impetiginous cheeks, because he loves you, he loves you more than he loved the intoxicating breath of his orthodontist. Scrawled at his camp table, upon his map box, by the light of bivouac fires, his missives fill your postbox. Do you recognize his dueling scar? His silk taffeta briefs? He is the dimmest star in the punch and judy constellation and his message is this, don’t be cruel.

  Yesterday when you were an idea in my head, yesterday when I rode this monorail through the Alhambra and you were an idea in my head, the idea of you was like a hot coil that boiled the other ideas and it boiled the other ideas until they were limp and jejune, until they were mush, and my head was sodden like a warm sponge and I laid it against the window and stared at the thin snaking line that marked that hour between then and this irradiated archipelago and only then could I open my eyes and I was like a speech being sent from one city to another and the speech became clearer and clearer as you faded away and it was very cold and very accurate and I crumpled your stationery and blotted the beads of perspiration from my forehead.

  When your life passes before your eyes, everything is seen in the context of its calibration. You see the hours as circles like the sweep of a clock’s hands and you see the days as squares like the days on a calendar and the hours fill the days like little faces and each face is filled with its own frozen tableau. Are these the times you’re talking about? Are you talking about the time that I slid my hand under your blouse and ran my knuckles up and down the ridges of your backbone? Are you talking about the time that you rubbed your palm against my erection and curled your fingers around my balls or the time that I pressed your breasts as close together as they would go? Are you talking about the time that you arched your back and moved slightly from side to side or the time that you caressed the tip of my penis with your moist fingers? Are you talking about the time that I rubbed the fabric of your underpants between the lips of your vagina? Are you talking about the time that I erupted like Krakatoa, and covered the entire earth with a dust cloud that darkened the skies for a week? Are you talking about the time I became so excited that the head of my cock just burst and you were left with a mouthful of blood? Why do you announce—yah, dis is nils pedersen speakin-when you answer the phone? You are not nils pedersen, although there are mornings when, naked save a sock and my wristwatch, I feel like peggy cass or ignatius of loyola, but …those stills from our past are faded daguerreotypes, memories held together with brittle crumbling sutures, voice boxes faintly gurgling in jars of formaldehyde, and now while you blow another bubble of saliva and I sink my last quarter in this panty hose machine, the moon like a magnet has warped our silhouettes and you have given my last two cigarettes cute nicknames and plugged them into your ears.

  I am the vacuum cleaner salesman in this orbiting suburb, the slumbering widower, the little colorful head on your pillow, the frightful shock in your drink, the fob chain, tobacco, and cuff link in your caddy, the cherub-shaped pastille who scents the air in your gangrenous salon, and you are so many lines of whimsical tripe embroidered up and down my ass, a tasteless remake of your mother who herself was a platter of luncheon meats.

  So, before the surgeon takes ten paces and aims his laser at my knotted skull, before he addresses this malignant growth with his 7-iron and takes a swing or two, before he says grace and sinks his carving knife into the sinew and gristle of my brain, I have one thing to say and though it may sound like death be not proud though some have called thee mighty and dreadful, what I really mean is this, your sister is too self-conscious about her weight and that’s why she had such a terrible time in Atlantic City. She never should have allowed that kind of silliness to dampen the pleasure of winning six thousand dollars. Now, suddenly, you seem thrilled that she’s finally met someone, but look who she’s invited into her life and inadvertently into yours—a man who’s indicted each tuesday and thursday, a man who whiles his time away suborning witnesses and garroting jurors, and doesn’t the thought of them making love in that squalid waterfront shack make it difficult for you to finish your spinach or is it somewhat exciting to imagine their rhythms amidst the ebb and flow of iridescent waters and the whirrr and thunk of flying cargo hooks? But I suppose you’re right, someday they’ll rope off his bathroom and charge admission, and there he’ll be, like Spinoza grinding lenses in Rijnsburg, sticking his hand between two pieces of bread and taking a bite.

  And instead of cutting two holes in your mask, you want me to describe this landscape for you. But how can I describe the clouds and the blue sky or the lagoon and its smell if I’m coming through the porch door and I hear a score that means curtains for my team on the radio? Out of habit I get a magazine and stare at her breasts, she lifts her arms like that. How can I reach her? By describing the clouds and the blue sky or the lagoon and its smell? What makes me leak the word “sleep” in a trail? It’s wrong to think that every well-dressed chimp, every little-league shortstop, every four-foot lothario who steps off the escalator in Penn Station is a potential benefactor. But to describe how they hang themselves with their bow ties, wheezing into their dictaphones that one final valedictory letter … Ah! That you like. You’re a delicious elixir, and you occupy my thoughts endlessly.

  Is denver a real city or just your mother’s address? Part of you is like a feather, but are you a glyph in the snow that gives off steam like the shanghai delight restaurant which hunches in the sleet on splayed arthropodic limbs and breathes vapor? No, you are more like a holiday that one leases. I love to miss you. I force myself to. It’s like being tickled. And becoming helpless. It’s like slipping on soap in the shower and waking up in a broderick crawford movie with bright orange hair and running mascara. It’s like singing mexican army songs with a black checker caught in one’s throat. It’s like a dream that ends with you pounding on my back.

  At this distance, semaphore or pantomime, even hawaiian dancing would be completely indecipherable. The affidavits have been shredded. “We Are Closed” signs are everywhere, and every key has been swallowed. That cloud that is creased like an onionskin seems to denature the moonlight and it indelibly stains the water, and when your shadow falls in my eyes, it stings so badly that I find the secretions of my own mouth indigestible. You no longer look like a camel when you sleep. The sequence of presidents has been shuffled. The days of the week have been renamed. Our old brand of kerosene has been taken off the shelves. Our favorite programs have been cancelled. This is a glut of coincidences. And after all those months of “letting the pieces fall where they may,” of playing in traffic, of divinity school, of bribing cops and cleaning up after circus animals, frame by frame, this epic for insomniacs has worked itself through the terrain, and, finally, the rails have crossed and mark this spot.

  So here we are again. Crouched between a blade of grass and a bottle of gin. In a lair as black and warm as a nostril. And tonight, in a field of pollarded tree trunks, you’ll unhook my yellow rain slicker and measure my biceps with calipers.

  The sails are cold and palpable in the bent light, and so is the cosmonaut’s tube of chicken kiev, so is your jawbone, so is the plaster cast of my dick, so is your wrecked corvette, and our spines are curled like fishhooks and nestled in the sand, and the wind whispers vermouth over the bay.

  THE TAO OF BEING WHITE

  I dated a lot of Esteé Lauder girls and was a monster to a few of them, until the police-state blossomed and fashionable girls from all echelons of demi-monde found their brains afloat in dishes of formaldehyde. I kept my figure up—which more often than not required surgery. And often the surgery was quite primitive. Bed of leaves as operating table, machete moving in moonlight,
strange birds whooping, humidity rike sauna, grunting in lieu of Mantovani. Sometime edge of blade make ablation, sometime numinous human spirit itself excise excrescent wrinkled fresh.

  What if prick becomes so tiny after drinking radioactive milk from Japanese mother that one have to have social life, perdue, this way and that a’way? Screwing thick-thighed horse-fly in a vestibule of my lazaretto overlooking a burg and the burg’s water supply and overlooking the puddle of hairy turbid fly love-juice. (Here’s funny part—I cannot find fly asshole to plug with finger during fly orgasm.)

  If I take you into the sauna, little lover, you’ll die. “Take me!” the fly says in my ear, “Let me space out tonight.” Go down on me, I say, and it lights after a while on my teeny prick.

  I lay in a pasture of flags, and troops and their brainless slatterns lay with me. Soon, as the sun fell into the side-pocket of night, I was coerced into cooking linguini verde. As they passed my steamy kettle, the girls winked at me, some hiked their skirts and blew kisses. I just kept cooking. The wonderful thing about what I was doing was that I deeply felt a dedication to my job. I remember thinking of my mother and how I must have annoyed her as she’d concoct mouthwatering dishes in a seeming jiffy. To digress for a second, and I truly mean this and don’t hesitate to nail my colors to the mast; the United States is the greatest country in the world. I think people should want to join the Army. Why shouldn’t the Army overtake the university in popularity? Shouldn’t the G.I., the martyred moral-frontiersman, soon supplant the teaching assistant, the canting troglodytic don, as varsity champion? The purple heart displace the diploma? I think of beautiful America as a tall and lean woman in a crowded pedestrian mall. A breathtakingly stunning woman.

  “Want to eat cock and pussy with a friend of mine?”

  “No,” she’d say, “Your friend should join a service organization or a bowling league. Meeting compatible members of the opposite sex right on the job is often the most natural and stress-free way to rekindle one’s social life.”

  And she’d walk on with that majestic bearing.

  A woman like that: I salute her.

  The next day, oil was discovered in my study; I was meditating when a black geyser shot up into my ass from a crack in the floorboards—it was an enema fraught with success, I thought. “Mark! Mark! We’re rich!” Mom came caterwauling and wiped me and taped the lucrative tissues to the refrigerator, for everyone to see what her son had done. When the accountant showed up, he said, “He’s made a million.” But the money didn’t last—Mom absconded with the bundle and, after a few nights of sturm and drang, I urged the cops to bust her ass.

  So I’d sit in a drugstore waiting for the little magazines to discover me … shot after shot of the wet stuff … and every somatic glyph, each pharmaceutical dish, each smooth veined pestle, each terrific thing, reminded me of you.

  I think of your snappy haircut, your shoes, and of wanting to paint the Eiffel Tower ofay with the cold cream from your face.

  HE HAD ONE OF THOSE

  AROOOOOOGA HORNS

  ON HIS CAR

  for Elizabeth Ross

  Arooooooga! Arooooooga!

  “Carla, he’s here!”

  “I’ll be right down!”

  “What did you do with the laundry tickets—I’ve got to go by there later?”

  Arooooooga! Arooooooga!

  “What were you reading about Vilas?”

  “What about Vilas?” she says, leafing through the paper.

  The kitchen looks nice. It’s suffused with the cheerful sunlight.

  “The thing about Vilas … you just read it to me.”

  Arooooooga! Arooooooga!

  “Oh, oh … ‘At last Vilas lunches on the clubhouse terrace’?”

  “No.” he says, wiping soft-boiled egg from his chin.

  “This, ‘Vilas passes jogging. He has planes to catch and no time for conversation. He must be in Copenhagen tonight, and in Tokyo a few hours after that’?”

  “Yeah … yeah.”

  Arooooooga! Arooooooga!

  “Carla!!”

  “I’ve got …” The rest of her sentence can’t be heard because of the dishwasher.

  “What’s wrong with the dishwasher?”

  “I think something’s caught in the blade.”

  “What blade?”

  “If you’d come over here and look you’d see what blade.”

  “What’s caught?”

  “Probably one of those idiotic ceramic handled hors d’oeuvre knives I’ve told you a million times not to put in the dishwasher.”

  Arooooooga! Arooooooga!

  “Does Carla know he’s here?”

  “You heard me screaming at her.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t know he’s here.”

  “I’ve been screaming at the top of my lungs.”

  “Maybe she didn’t hear you.”

  “She answered … she said she’d be right down.”

  “Maybe she just meant that in a routine way.”

  Arooooooga! Arooooooga!

  He almost knocks the salt and pepper shakers and the bottle of vitamins over, reaching for the ashtray.

  “If you’re going to the laundry, take the stuff I’ve got.”

  “What stuff?”

  “It’s in a pile next to the hamper.”

  “Do you want that velour thing cleaned?”

  “No, leave it. I might want to wear it if I go help Norman with the car tonight.”

  “His Fiat?”

  “No, Barbara’s Malibu.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “Steven had a little accident with it or something.”

  “Why can’t he just …”

  “The trunk’s just jammed.”

  Arooooooga! Arooooooga!

  “I think I hear her coming.”

  “Carla?!”

  “Carla!” they both yell.

  There are no pets in the house. At least none have ventured into the kitchen and one would imagine the smell of breakfast to be a pungent animal attractant.

  “Where was Vilas going to be before Tokyo?”

  Arooooooga! Arooooooga!

  “What?”

  “Where did it say Vilas was going to be before Tokyo?”

  She leafs back through the paper, “Copenhagen.”

  “I knew something reminded me of Danny Kaye.”

  “What’s that got to do with Danny Kaye?”

  “He sang that song ‘Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen’ in that film about Hans Christian Andersen.”

  “Norway seems like it would be nice.”

  “Copenhagen’s Denmark.”

  “I know, I meant Norway.”

  Arooooooga! Arooooooga!

  “Are you going to call Marilyn about the house this summer or should I?”

  “This week’s very bad for me,” he says, lighting a True Menthol.

  “What’s so bad?”

  “Busy. I’ve got that thing in Morris County coming to trial Thursday—Friday if we’re lucky. And I’ve got that crazy business with your brother-in-law’s doctor …”

  “Carla only wants to come for half this summer if we go.”

  “It’s up to her.”

  “I’ll call then.”

  “Ask her about something closer to the beach this time.”

  “The other one wasn’t that far.”

  “It was a twenty minute walk.”

  Arooooooga! Arooooooga!

  “Carla!!” she yells.

  He counts his change and yells too, “Carla!”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “Is she in the bathroom?”

  “She might be in there.”

  “Do you have quarters?”

  “Wait … yeah. When Marilyn talked to …”

  “I need quarters now for the lot. I owe them sixty cents from a few weeks ago anyway.”

  “You should park in the lot near your father’s old store.”

  “That’s a fifteen minute w
alk.”

  “Isn’t it free?”

  “It’s not even so near that store—it’s about two blocks … it’s nearer to the Stanley than to the store.”

  “It’s first come first serve anyway … you could see a movie on the way.”

  “They’re all Spanish.”

  “You never took Spanish in …”

  “There’s no Spanish there now anyway—it’s all Indian now.”

  “… there’s Indonesian, Indian …”

  “There’s about eight Indian groceries.”

  “You should get me some curry.”

  “You can get curry at the supermarket—I bet it’s cheaper.”

  “You think that would be cheap?”

  “Cheaper.”

  “If it’s cheaper here, no one would shop there, never mind open eight groceries.”

  “They live there—they shop there. It’s got nothing to do with saving a few pennies. It’s neighborhood stores …”

  “If it’s a few pennies, you could just as easily pick me up some things.”

  “Like what things?”

  “Like curry powder.”

  “I’m not even parking near there. I owe the other lot about sixty cents so I have to go there anyway.”

  “I don’t have time to fool with that anyway this week. We’ll have franks tonight—on the grill or something … maybe just a cold salad. I have my hands full this week. I have about three months of late planning to do in one week …”