I Smell Esther Williams

by Mark Leyner

  Arooooooga! Arooooooga!

  “What are you doing?”

  “Counting the months till July.”

  “On your fingers? It’s three months.”

  “You don’t even know when you’re taking your month. How can I make any arrangements?”

  “I told you … Make arrangements and I’ll work around them.”

  “Alright then, I’ll plan for July … and it’s four months.”

  “What four months? There’s a week and a half left this month.”

  “Two weeks—and if I have to put down a deposit or sign something, it matters.”

  “It doesn’t matter. If there’s a deposit—there’s a deposit. But call me before you do anything.”

  “I thought Art’s girl got married and left.”

  “She did.”

  “I thought she answered yesterday when I called.”

  “That must have been Susan.”

  “Who’s Susan?”

  “Susan’s a new secretary.”

  “Whose?”

  “No one’s yet. We’re getting one more girl and then rearranging the whole thing.”

  “You’re not going to have Fran anymore?”

  “No, no, Fran’s staying with me.”

  “Who else left?”

  “Frank Tarrant’s girl.”

  “She already …”

  “She didn’t leave—she was fired. She was incompetent.”

  “How’s your penis today?”

  “Redder.”

  “All European men must have red penises then.”

  “If they wear tiny mesh underpants they have red penises.”

  “You said European …”

  “I said European cut, not mesh frankfurter skins.”

  Arooooooga! Arooooooga!

  She leaves and returns with a stack of magazines.

  “What’s that?” he says rubbing his eye.

  “Cynthia …”

  “My eye itches like crazy … Cynthia what?”

  “Cynthia Hayden asked for these when I was done.”

  “Cynthia Hayden wants decorator magazines?”

  “She asked for them when I was done so I said fine. Don’t rub it—it’s getting all red.”

  “Do we have any Visine?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. Why don’t you rinse it a little with some cool water.”

  “It’s alright.”

  “Did you see the picture of Carter with the Indian headdress?”

  “Where?”

  She folds the paper and hands it to him.

  “What’s that for?”

  “It has something to do with that commercial where the Indian cries about pollution.”

  “He reminds me of Anthony Quinn at the end of ‘Requiem For A Heavyweight.’ ”

  “Is that … is that where Bogart does publicity for …”

  “That’s not ‘Requiem …’ ”

  “Let me finish.”

  “I know what you’re talking about.”

  “What?”

  “That’s not ‘Requiem For A Heavyweight.’ That’s ‘The Harder They Fall.’ Bogart’s a sports writer and becomes a press agent for this mob’s fighter stable … no, for this mob-owned giant South American fighter who can’t fight. He’s a giant dumb fighter—the ‘Bull of the Pampas’ or something—and they let him get slaughtered and don’t pay him and he’s got poor parents and everything and finally at the end Bogart pays him out of his own pocket and writes a big exposé with his wife leaning over the typewriter.”

  “Do you want a match?”

  “No … wait … yeah, yeah—I thought I had one more in here.”

  She reaches into a drawer across from the table.

  “Here.”

  He lights a True Menthol with a kitchen match.

  “When you spoke to your father last, what did he say about your mother’s surgery?”

  “What about it?”

  “Does she need it or not or what?”

  “Probably. She’s got an appointment this week or next week with a man in New York.”

  “With Larry’s cousin?”

  “Not Larry’s cousin—with a gastroenterologist.”

  “At Mount Sinai?”

  “Not at Mount Sinai—at his office.”

  “She’s upset?”

  “She’s probably upset. It’s not serious really.”

  “What do you mean it’s not serious?”

  “It’s not serious—she’ll probably need it done every once in a while from now on. It’s annoying and uncomfortable—but it’s not serious.”

  “What’s serious to you?”

  “A blood clot is serious, a broken hip is serious at her age, a heart attack is serious, a stroke …”

  ANOTHER CITIZEN’S HOLIDAY

  Paige had again found herself in the position of defending her stout republicanism. When the call to evacuate came over the wireless, we were like breathless kewpie dolls waiting to get knocked over. In retrospect, I think some of us were ready to tickle and goose each other, or slide down the banister like banshees, or almost kill each other … anything. Our wraith of a monarch had gotten us out of one jam too many. A child’s bib with scenes from a chiropractor’s office on it was draped over the trophy you’d received from the figure salon, and, in the sense of no two snowflakes being exactly alike, the spectrum of smirks seemed infinite and optimism’s things were taken from the guest room and heaped on a mattress of straw on the gatehouse’s cellar floor from which, ten years ago, we had watched the Jets defeat Baltimore. Suddenly, the investment of libidinal energy appeared transparently premature. And night fell like a skydiving student with an incompetent instructor.

  So it was regretful when frog-voiced Dr. Bim revealed supper’s deceptive allure. “I don’t care what people say! I’m sick of pretending and scheming!” And burst into the florid leitmotif of the chain Burger Rex that fell on flushed burning ears.

  When he shot her a glance that was like the pulsar at the heart of the Crab Nebula, her body slang translated into the “missing mass” needed to bind the universe and she squirmed in her seat like Laura says Clarence does. She seemed muddleheaded. You could picture untreated waste surging up her carotid arteries, coursing through the plexus of aqueducts in her brain. She possessed all the qualities of a carrier. And there hadn’t been a shadow of doubt among us that she’d eventually beguile some eligible westerner with her ability to transmit vast quantities of data quickly and efficiently. She was, in this way, so much like the public—not issue oriented; and, in another way, so much like Moses—the apotheosis of style. Perhaps prosperity lay upon the far flung frontiers of the empire. There were ten thousand tons of gold in the Serra das Andorinhas to be had. Bim tapped the aspic mold of the Krupp munition plant with his teaspoon and watched it shake.

  That ice-cold metal lozenge beat in his body, his demeanor not unlike a palindrome—identical coming and going. Natural history had never seemed less like a change of pace. My snaps cracked in the washer’s mini-basket tub and the red fragrant spine sizzled up the flue—the suspected mass of frizzled hair between the teeth of plumbers everywhere caused a great deal of unacknowledgeable anticipation. It was impossible to decide whether to stay or go and the local crowd had arrayed itself on both sides of the controversy … they’d quarrel and then make-up, quarrel and then make-up, quarrel and then make-up, quarrel and then make-up, quarrel and then makeup, and their eyes would turn like little pairs of sequins from wristwatch to wristwatch as if the time of day were a poker hand that someone held. In the refrigerator’s hum one could discern those unsettling lines from Edna Keeston’s poem “Chafing Dish Dinner Is My Name-O”: “… and exercise devices / developed by former Olympic athletes / girdle the planet.”

  I had exhausted my patience trying to reason with him. He’d claimed that I brought the snowy weather with me—that I’d come through Union Station, D.C.’s gargantuanistic ecclesiastical tr
ain station with contraband weather in my bags. She sat in front of a Titan heater and the rotating blade forced hot air against her cheeks. It felt hard in my pocket. Let’s make a mistake we’ll regret. Again I canvassed the neighborhood, with my masquerade and luggage—the sun gently tapered towards the corner of town. Again this sense of ethnicity, this sense of culpability, which, by day, surfaced like bubbles in beer, by nightfall was impossible to distinguish from the sidereal backdrop that exhausts bullets in its dense ultramarine. Footsteps were sloshy—sneakers filled with champagne. He’s got a staple gun, someone yelled. He’s stapling everyone’s hat to his head—trying to bring it all back to the 1930’s. J. Edgar Hoover—more effective when he and the gangsters he chased dressed alike. But it had all happened once too often. E-Street across from the FBI Building, a hamburger joint, boys with radios strapped like life support systems to their bodies. It started snowing. It started snowing again. From the window, this was not visible. A striped feather fell like a limp wrist from the wine bottle on its sill and the flying saucer was an astringent to the eyes.

  God, it was beautiful and while some aliens disappear through the brackish surfaces of patio pools, change their names, and erect lawn ornaments towards which citizens in transit direct their heated comment, others cling to tradition, the women allowing the hair beneath their arms to grow until it tumbles to their elbows like hanging plants. A week before our birthdays, we turned restlessly in bed. Lay in our submarine. Swayed in the hammock in our submarine. Held our ankles and held our heads between our knees. I dreamt I was the plane’s pilot and bombed the city. How I’d hold you in my mind. The amaranth of your face wafted in the day’s crests and troughs. But it was no good. Smitty felt pressure from his mother’s side of the family to marry only a girl who believed that the sun revolved around the earth. He felt pressure expand at his skull’s seams and he had a bottle of Irish whiskey to drink. I stuck a finger into the St. Croix bric-a-brac. Good-bye saucer, alien, sub, pilot, hinged headache, whiskey, bric-a-brac, stuffed nose. Good-bye full bladder, cher ami.

  I suspected that someday this message for you would be transmitted through the neutrino mail, and ease through the earth’s core, emerging someday in your smallville, and slipping through the gold slot at the bottom of your door: Where did we go wrong? What roadsign, in the moonless night, through the murkiness of our tinted glass, did we misinterpret? Why didn’t you say what you meant about your needs at a time when our levels of wholeness were originating in our being meaningfully instead of possessively involved in the feelings we mutually held but mutually refused to acknowledge on any terms other than our own respectively, as if by different treasure maps we could arrive at the same X-marks-the-spot in terms of us? Should we have sought professional counseling?

  The cab driver retrieved a discolored rag from beneath his seat and stanched the steady trickle of blood from a wound above one eye that had been inflicted by the jagged tip of a teakwood-handled parasol belonging to his previous fare. The embassy flagpoles were empty. Certain types, I thought to myself, are utterly practical, in the tradition, for instance, of the pioneering test pilots who logged their flight data in pencil because ink would freeze at higher altitudes. As we neared the General Accounting Office, I glanced at my watch and yielded to a sudden impulse, directing the driver to undertake a slight detour. Call it hackneyed, call it sentimental, but I had to see the Tidal Basin just once more. And idling near its shore, I spied them: two entwined smartly-dressed saplings cooing like Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald beneath a naturally formed gazebo of Japanese cherry blossoms. “There,” he said, waving up at the glorious canopy of inviolable American air space, “is where our thoughts are kept after we die.” “The Washington Monument,” she mumbled, “is a mammoth white french fry stretching towards the mouth of a celestial teenage presence,” and he turned and turned and turned and the lights from the high rises along the Potomac trembled in the water.

  The train was filled with spirits of the dead stained with the dross that hung in the air, not from New Jersey, but from its filthy neighboring states like Pennsylvania. The train was filled with a spirit of dandruff and with basketball players … with their portable lives. And passengers were employing telekinesis to get lunch rather than wait on line and the air was filled with slow moving sandwiches, but now and then an alarming biological clock-radio would spark a mini-disturbance. Then in Trenton, a girl named Polly sat next to me wearing white patent leather shoes with little straps and she peered at me as if I were the creditor-dodging dabbler in laudanum and abnormality from whom she had undoubtedly fled, but, in the unblemished light of thorough scrutiny, the resemblance apparently vanished, and when she got a big package of tootsie rolls out of a shiny little white purse, I dove for my cigarettes, almost surrendering to impulse once more, almost blurting out “this is the planet of escapes, let’s you and I swallow the key and stay awhile,” almost quoting the astronomer from It Came From Outer Space, “… this may be the biggest thing that ever happened,” but I became nauseated by the confluent odors of tootsie roll and Prince Matchabelli, and in my pants my penis drooped like the long ash of a burning cigarette. And then we stopped in front of a large Johnson & Johnson plant to let cattle cross over the tracks. So beautiful. Through the plant’s grounds ran a network of pseudo-Venetian canals filled with the most luxuriant lotions and powders for the delectation of both rail and automobile traffic. And shortly after we resumed our progress, I resumed my observation of the passing Jersey flora.

  I arrived at my parents’ winter home in time to see the LaConti Construction crew unload from its truck the nine-foot marble head from Daniel Chester French’s statue “Neapolitan Fisherboy Listening To A Short-Wave Radio.” In his desperation to find me a suitable birthday gift, Father had hired LaConti to decapitate the statue which was on loan to the Newark Museum from the National Gallery. I had always been very keen on French’s work. My sister, on the other hand, had always been a gravity buff. “Father,” I said, “what have you done? You’ve defaced a national treasure.” Mother wrung her hands, “You test us and test us—holding your breath till you’re blue—getting outa the car, into the car, outa the car—you drive us to it!” Father snapped a bulbous rubber nose into place, “Gotta split—G-men after us—take care of the firm, boy of mine.” “What did you get Ruth?” I yelled after him. “Go see, she’s in her room,” he said, wrapping his arms around Mother’s waist, their moped zipping down the driveway. I dashed upstairs. There, suspended magnetically above her beanbag chair, was a specially annealed niobium cylinder. My sister was on the couch in the fond clutches of her fiancé who had a nearly two-dimensional head—it was the flattest head I’d ever seen—her sweater was bunched up around her neck and her unsnapped brassiere rested above her bare breasts like eyeglasses on someone’s forehead. What a meshugena gift.… We all felt smaller and smaller in the coming days, which seemed shorter and shorter. And everything seemed diminished and fly-by-night.

  Well, what is so new about Jersey? Or Mexico. Or England. What could be new in this multiplication of the present … in these bowdlerized translations from the rural? The good life, so called, is over, and that laugh we’d flexed hangs a bit flaccidly between our ears … we seem serious about wanting to outlive each other … and that may be the one source of all travel.

  We are unhappy fleas, aren’t we.

  Well, if ever there was a rebuttal to marital felicity—they were it. He inevitably left the oven on and compared her Belgian waffles to old sanitary napkins and never saw to it that there were enough bulbs in the house, and she, as you could imagine, was not the easiest person in the world to get along with, but … listen to me.… I’ve been chattering away like a galley slave, and look at the hour. The sun is up, and it’s time to let the greyhounds chase me round the track. Again.

  MEMORIA IN AETERNA

  Hoping that one last slug of warm Shlitz would give him the courage to finally say to Patty, “I love your breasts, the way one breast pre
sses against the U of your sweatshirt, the way the other presses against the A, making the S a spot where a man could lay his head in peace,” Oscar tipped his airline cup to his lips. But the words wouldn’t come and god Oscar wanted to slip his hand under that shirt and feel her warm bare back and kiss her freckled nose. “This is where I get off,” he said, crestfallen, squeezing past Patty’s knees and ambling up the aisle to the door of the plane. “Bye,” he waved sheepishly; and he jumped. As he fell through the air, he looked up towards Patty’s window and Patty was frantically waving his parachute in her hand, yelling “Oskie, you forgot this!” Oscar’s descent, being the shortest path between two points, was swift. He hit the ground with an awful thud. I was the first to reach him. “Oscar, buddy, ol’ pal of mine, say a few syllables,” I said. His eyes seemed a bit glazed. “Someone just hit me in the head with a pillow,” he said. “Oscar, Oscar,” I keened, “You’re seven-eighths dead, you’re all busted up like a ceramic Buddha dropped from the World Trade Center—do you have any last words?” I wet his lips with my italian ices. “All I ever wanted to do,” he whispered, “was finish my novel … and drag a good Catholic girl through the mud a few times.” “Ciao, old friend,” I said. Randy, Normandi, Ray, Rachel, Wayne, and me—we’ll never forget you.

  THE YOUNG AMERICAN POETS

  The Japanese are an obnoxious people because they restrict the sale of American-made concentrated orange juice, but their endemic monster cinema makes our American-made psychological tragi-comedy seem like rewarmed tripe. Japanese women adulate young American men. Their jeans, their tough-guy posture, their gum-chewing delivery, their violent inability to sustain intercourse. Jan. 29, 1945: her name was Marianne Faithful and she was related to Alfred Dreyfus. She was exonerated when her nails were found barely incompatible with the murder weapon. When I returned, the body was back. Waists existed. Hips existed. There was a legginess that hadn’t been seen in years (ankles suddenly very sexy). She wouldn’t allow herself to get instant feedback—maybe she was enjoined by the Miracle Temple beneath the Mile High Stadium. “The door for reconciliation is not closed,” she lied, tightening the screws, as the plumbers from the Bahamas who’d taken the old Third Avenue E said “O.K., take my wife,” the other, “O.K., please eat my daughter’s remains.” I stood in front of the louvered blinds. The way to a man’s heart may be his stomach but the way to a woman’s heart is her nose. If you really stink she’ll recoil and if you start to stink, gradually or suddenly, she’ll stop loving you and she won’t even kiss you good-bye. A fair number of Dutch settlers kissed in the seventeenth century. Later, Washington would kiss his wife. Burns says that the freezing militiamen kissed to keep warm; that the kissing was ostensibly expedient or “contingent upon field conditions.” Soon, after signing important declarations, statesmen congratulated each other with very formal kisses. I study Clint Eastwood at the Clint Eastwood Institute in Clint Eastwood, California and, later, off-campus, embrace the woman to whom I’ve shown my feelings, to whom I’ve exhibited my notion of feeling. Then, after making reference to the vivacity of a cloud up there, she drops below the surface of the earth and becomes, in terms of haute couture, “unnaturally plain.” Tuesday morning I stepped into the sun; finally my friend Marianne Faithful had mercifully disengaged or unenveloped herself from her maritimey comforter which smelled like, god forbid, some baby had cheesed on it. The sun had given her garden a facial and she looked like a person who had gone to Tulane—I had never seen such an intractably bitchy glint. I glanced at my wallet and then ogled deeper—no money. No money—no razor blades, no books about photography, I thought at first. But then I ogled deepest into it. Never before had my wallet seemed girlish, but now it was empty and dark and very sexy. I’ve been wondering about the thunder we’ve been having. The apartment complex is having apoplexies over this thunder. Some say it’s shifts in the layers of the zircon-belt, which girds the earth like a digital watch of doom. Some say the earth is shrinking—that we are a tenth the size we were an instant ago—that the universe exhausts itself in a series of hiccough-like contractions—that we are loitering in a minute and minuter lobby. In the future, the qualities that make for a fine waiter will perhaps be the most sought after. There will be a “Cadillac of Men”—a top-quality ideal towards which the young people will lean their shoulders. Then, the elegant, crackerjack, and ebullient, eloquent president of GE insinuates himself onto our dance floor, (into my mirror as I depilate my big beard), creating an epidemic of surprise that no one gets used to, and cleans out our fridge—consumes our soup and soap, and spews his yucky phlegm into Susan’s open lingerie department. Someday, picnics will be forgotten. The very idea will lay interrred in wax museums and glass-encased exhibits. Or picnics will even become punishable offenses. For some, picnics require full course meals and linen cloths—for some, simply a rope, magazine and tissues. But all picnic people agree on one thing: Look Out For Ants! their famous esprit de corps can be maniacal and sarcastic in the dirtiest human way—unless you legitimately confront them, they will abuse you en masse, provided they are not preoccupied with their day to day drudgery, their sickening housework that involves, coincident with a blissful ethics of survival, a highly derivative arts and crafts. Marianne tortured her hair in front of the mirror—a coma was not her idea of “stepping out”; 10:58! isn’t my toast ready yet? The toast lay jam-side up on the sunbaked thoroughfare—about it resounded the boots of a thousand workers. The peasants came to the capital, turned into beggars within a week and went to the church to die. Why do some women still want marriage when all most husbands want to do is have a nice day? Aren’t women silly oddsmakers? As for eligible men: what about the thought of needing a ration book to get a dollop of sex a day from a stewardess or fashion model or during lunch hour on a magazine editor’s couch? I remember being much younger, fellating my chauffeur Champion during a rush hour tie-up on the Zwieback Thruway as the sun says “sayonara young American boys, don’t put morphine on a pedestal” and Champion says “Don’t fellate me with gum in your mouth—you’ll drool and it will harden in my pubic hair like stone—as stony as the undertaker’s upper lip.” “O.K. Champion,” I say, “I won’t try to fellate you and chew gum at the same time.” In the wake of so many historians and biographers, June Rossbach Bingham said of U Thant, “he inhabits a glass tower but not an ivory one” always kissing and hugging and squeezing the Mrs. with undiminished vitality. June Bingham grew up in New York, attended Vassar, married Jonathan B. Bingham and was graduated from Barnard. When Jonathan Bingham ran for Congress in 1964, she became engulfed by politics. My houseboy Champion has friends who had a long traditional marriage and turned it 180 degrees into a new, deeper, open, trusting friendship, and recently developed a humanistic counseling program in Brazil and their child, once threatened with no dessert when he wouldn’t eat his spinach (overcooked and watery, no doubt), is today’s gourmet, delighted to skip dessert as long as he’s promised his risotto verde con spinaci—the leafy green of the spinach and the buttery mellowness of the rice bound together by melting threads of walnut-like Parmesan cheese. I called my mother to see what I should serve with that. She said that a cocktail made of morphine or heroin, usually cocaine, sometimes gin, sugar syrup and chlorpromazine syrup was used in Great Britain. “Barf!” Marianne choked when I told her, “I’m glad I’m American!” “Are you kidding?” I said, “Use of that mixture in the United States would violate narcotics law.” She averted the suspicion of my eyes, somehow. Later I yelled to her, “Dear, I’m getting the portable heater and going down into the Hole for a while.” Bruce Pesin is a perfect illustration of the brown-tongued, canting, third-rate, feckless academic. He is a discredit to our race—a shanda for the goyim. William Howard, Motorola’s director of strategic operations, cringed as he entered the commissary and saw a circle of bachelors surrounding Ms. Eggnog like a brigadoon of phagocytes. “Isn’t she a remarkable specimen?” “She certainly ain’t no guy!” someone exploded. One of the most charming cere
monies in our culture is the family dinner at which it is decided that a child needs psychological help. The milkman was over and as soon as he left I called his office and told them that he ought to be locked up—under a microscope even a human scalp flake can look like a stylized Navaho rug … a lot of people thought we’d be looking through Field Marshall Rommel’s goggles right now. “The hot water in my apartment takes a while getting hot so a few days ago while I was waiting for it I was thinking about everything from auto racing to wax effigies.” “I often do that. Can you imagine—a little boy looking out at the world.” “The older you are, the better it seems.” “Oy … you’re making an analogy with enology.” “Do you want to have lunch this week?” “I want to have an affair with you.” “Oh … darling … I want to have an affair with you too.” “You do?… I want to have an affair with you too … darling.” Thursday, Feb. 2: We Are Not Alone. Saturday, Feb. 4: in a darkened movie theatre a male voice whispers, “Kiss me.” A female voice answers, “No … we are not alone.” Here’s something that shouldn’t be hushed up: condemnation of extramarital sexual relations ran about 69 percent in 1973 and 72 percent in 1977. In 1973, 25 percent of the response said that “there was no right or wrong way to make money, only easy and hard,” and in 1976 the figure was 26 percent. I’m non grata at about nine European casinos. I transferred my accounts from the Gunbarrel National Bank to the First National Bank and began courting the constellations of fortune and went home and eradicated my body stains with great brio and imagined myself in an Hawaiian island’s version of the roaring twenties. I sense in the inspiration behind prohibition a bittersweet poignancy not unlike the excruciating need, felt by some today, to have resident physicians in their households. Sweetheart, remember playing gin rummy? Someone smelled a rat and socked me and put me on queer street and, I swear to god, someone almost had an hysterical pregnancy. You said, “Sweetheart … take me out of here.” Friday, Feb. 10: went to see Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête with Doc, Blitzen, Sneezy, and Rachel. The little stewardesses in back of us needed their psychic cellars dredged. Many people equate splitting the atom with balkanizing the island of Japan. This is, in many ways, a good thing, because it shows that people are not letting their thinking caps molder in their closets—that they are not intellectually agoraphobic. How can people be agoraphobic? I remember my nanny glistening above the palisades, above the crenellated ramparts, waxing her legs, surveying all the landscapes beyond her simple smelly provenance. Had she capitulated to agoraphobia’s shifty and seductive “bargain”, god knows what the total sum of her woes would have been. It would have taken a calculator to figure out. Tuesday, Feb. 14: I left the apartment to get a Valentine’s Day gift. If I had a son, I wouldn’t let him go to parties where dykes were marathon violent-kissing. Have a son … ha!… I can’t even have plants with the lighting my apartment gets. We engender our young in the sewers, teach them to swim, hope à toute outrance (F., to the very utmost) that they persevere etc. etc. etc … the point is, they invariably dunk themselves like crullers (crullers with souls and feelings, though) in our mess. People should not love without respite—even people’s love for Fred Allen’s style of broadcasting eventually waned—and it’s about time that the young American poets took Marianne Faithful off her pedestal. One night she could be like a statue—cold and beautiful On another, she could be like a midnight snack on a Spanish galley, on another, like a radioactive mutant. A few nights ago she touched me as if she were blindfolded—as if it were a last cigarette. I was so mixed up about sex that night. If tears were worth money, my pillow would have been as rich as a Texas oil millionaire who’d just won a huge grant. In lieu of kidnapping, more and more young people are having children of their own. Mayonnaise gone bad can be lethal and I wonder if being a stewardess is the vaunted career it once was. Ms. Eggnog left me a note: “Dear Mark, Go fuck yourself. I can’t stand it anymore. They’re lulling us into a false sense of security about radioactivity.” I began to suspect some sleight of hand involving the bonds my grandparents held in escrow. I sent the little money I had left to Charo. Last night was restless—complicated problems seemed to materialize out of thin air. I dreamt of a babysitter who appeared to have X-ray vision as he gazed into a cradle. “There was an ape living in a house on a hill, blanketed with weeds,” he mentioned to the baby. “Then doctors told him he had but a year to live. The ape said, “Oh Doctor, please put me to sleep now.” The doctor said, “O.K. Drink this claret and listen to this boring tape.” The sitter threw his wine in the baby’s face, waking it from an unconscious sleep. The baby seemed almost extraterrestrial, holding her pajama top. “Quickly,” she barked, “get me some cold water and a rag!” I passed around two rubber or golf balls for inspection. I applied a little bit of soap I had hidden under the table. I pressed the balls together. Because of the soap, they stuck together and “magically” balanced. Yesteday, as we were about to end our relationship, Marianne was crippled in an industrial accident, and I had to spend the rest of my life caring for her. Monumental hookups span the countryside; dirt roads ramify throughout the topography like varicose veins forming elaborate paraphs upon the ragamuffin arrangement of brassiere cup-sizes, and gals sell kisses on the fairgrounds, while youths languorously sip mare’s milk—good motels are being built in the distance—no one speaks English—a significant minority of women have shaved heads—distant neighbors communicate with loudspeakers—trucks deliver milk to the various institutions—you are my wife—good-bye city life. I spent all afternoon on the sofa, putting on and taking off my deodorant, contemplating suicide, sitting in the breeze, putting on deodorant, taking deodorant off. The vice-presidency is the spare-tire on the automobile of government and, unfortunately, many cosmetics and toiletries are carcinogenic, so people are wearing yogurt masks. Rivers of hamster and gerbil blood apparently coursed through the backyard patios and barbecue pits of America, according to high school scientists who admitted to fads of “afternoon research.” One kid, now a dinner pianist at New Jersey’s Westwood Club, smiled and confessed, “We killed a lot of mice … a lot of mice.” Ms. Eggnog: Your letter arrived by carrier pigeon … I didn’t care for the letter but ate the pigeon. Describing two girls, I once said, “She is the pinnacle … she is the nadir.” Little women make sharks in their briny commodes. I saw a tooth brush against my grave. I got a job at the gift and toy store and had to say to the owner, “Your work is good—but you want to be the Nadia Comanechi of poetry.” There was an unexpected bummer on the shores of peppermint bay. She needed tampons and sent him for them. He used his razor and left it on the bathtub. He left the toilet lid up and she sat in the water.