Saving St. Germ

by Carol Muske-Dukes

“Right. Olivia. Ollie for short.”

  We smiled again, stupidly.

  The tuxedoed waitress brought our drinks as he admired the fan of Ollie photographs I spread across the table, a kind of protective shield between us.

  “She looks like you,” he said, “burning with that fever—it’s in her eyes. And she’s got your red hair and that ... You know, that talking-out-the-side-of-your-mouth look of yours.”

  “Everyone seems to think she’s screwed up but me.”

  “Well? Who knows her best—you or them?”

  We talked briefly about Ollie, and in the course of that conversation, I felt relaxed again about her, about myself, about her behavior. The tensions of the last months dissolved into a new shiny substance that ran brightly, seductively, in my veins: I was a good mother after all, I was brave, everything would be all right. It shocked me, the extent to which I needed this reassurance—needed to know that someone thought I was doing all right. My pathetic manner made me smile, and Jesse smiled back at me.

  “Remember the last time we met like this?”

  “Sure. Gold Moon Thai. You raised your glass to say good-bye to me.”

  “And here we are again.”

  He nodded emphatically. We sipped our drinks, sizing each other up. Then he looked down at his hands.

  “My father died a few months ago.”

  “Jesus, Jess, I’m sorry.”

  He held his glass up, looked intently at the contents, then put it down.

  “I had gotten a lot closer to him these last couple years. He never talked to me much when I was a kid, and suddenly he’d reached a point in his life when he wanted to just ... unload some stuff about himself. We’d go out to a bar or just sit next to each other on a bench at the park, watching a pickup ball game. He’d tell me all about his childhood, about meeting my mom. Amazing. After years of silence.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Heart attack. Classic myocardial infarct. Boom. Just like that.”

  “No history of heart disease?”

  “He was overweight, didn’t exercise. I was always after him—but he’d had an EKG a month before in a routine checkup and there wasn’t a sign of trouble. Nothing. Like an echocardiogram of a kid.”

  He lifted his glass and drank. Then he looked at me, that inquiring calm look.

  “I had a dream about him a little while after he died. But it didn’t feel like a dream. You know that preconscious state you’re in before waking? I was right there sleeping in my bed, but awake in some way. He came and sat beside my bed and put his hands on my chest and pressed down. I started to wake up and he kept pressing gently on my chest, saying it’s OK, everything’s OK.”

  “He was pressing on your chest?”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a little slow. It took me a while to realize that he was telling me that he was OK, he was all right, yes, which was what I needed to know—but also that my heart was OK. He was reassuring me that I wasn’t going to die of a heart attack too.”

  “You?”

  “Shit yes. Well. I didn’t realize at the time just how afraid to die I was.” He looked at me, a self-deprecating glance. “I mean, I’m a doc. But then, maybe I was more terrified because I am a physician. I’d been doing all this bullshit death-defying stuff, hang gliding, bungee jumping, after his death just to prove that I was brave, ready to face the Zero. But of course, I wasn’t facing it at all. He knew that about me. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about him. He knew all this about me, he came back to release me. He blessed me with his hands.”

  We smiled slowly at each other again. Then his smile turned dangerous. “Not to ruin the mood, but there was another manifestation of my need for release, but absolutely real.”

  I held my breath. I knew Jesse; I knew what was coming.

  “Yeah?”

  “Well.” He looked around, shaking his head. “It was weird. I was on a plane flying to a conference in Florida right after my father’s death. I mean, it was right after the funeral, a day, maybe, and I was still in shock. I was sitting on the plane; we’d been in the air for a while. I had an aisle seat for leg room, and this girl, this young Asian woman, very pretty, was suddenly leaning over me, asking if she could take the empty window seat next to me.”

  He looked at me anxiously. I sipped my drink.

  “She sat down and immediately covered herself from the waist down with an airline blanket. She looked over at me: beautiful eyes and skin; perfume; wearing a flimsy kind of blouse.”

  I started to laugh.

  “No, listen, Esme. I mean it’s what you think, but it also is not that. I’d been sitting there shocked, almost drugged feeling, and I returned to this state after she sat down. Then she spoke to me. She said, ‘You look really sad, are you OK?’ I mumbled something and she stared at me and said, ‘Here, give me your hand, I can help you,’ and she took my hand and put it between her legs—she had taken off her underwear.”

  “Jesus, Jesse.”

  “Listen. OK, so there I am, thirty-seven thousand feet above sea level, with my index finger on this young woman’s clitoris, and it’s not what you think! I mean yes, yes, it was deeply erotic, of course, but further, it was, it was ...”

  “Spiritual.”

  “Esme, listen. Don’t judge. Just then the pilot announced our gradual descent into Miami International and we started to bank and lose altitude. I’m massaging her, and I’m inside her, but it was not just sexual, it was this slow intense dreamy release. Then we descended, down, down through the cloud layers, and she started to come. Christ, it was overheated in the cabin; the sun poured through the windows as we banked, we had our heads together and she was making those sounds. We landed all at once, we dropped out of the clouds and I could feel this long long orgasm happening in my hand, coming up into my fingers, through my hand, my arm.”

  “Sounds like you helped her instead of the other way around.”

  “No, no. I’m telling you, it was like being born. Falling through the clouds, connected to the power at the center of this woman.”

  “Then she unbuckled her seat belt, pulled up her pants, got her overhead baggage down, and split?”

  He laughed. “Yeah. She walked a little funny, though.”

  “God, you’re horrible, Jesse. Why do I like you?”

  “Is it because I tell you the unvarnished truth? Or is it because I tell it funny?”

  “It’s because you don’t have to try.” I paused. “Either way.”

  There was another pause.

  “Is it OK if I ask about you?”

  I drank deeply of my margarita, then put it down, tasting salt.

  “About me is simple. I’m not particularly happy in my life right now and I’m vulnerable to ... you know.” I looked around, flustered, shrugged. “Losing altitude.”

  He nodded gravely.

  I leaned toward him.

  “I’m drawn to allegory, Jesse. You always did tell good stories.” Another long pause. “But if you talk about ... blessing, you know, that’s the whole point. I think that in this fucking state of entropy we live in, the power to bless is the only real power for good that we have. That’s what I think.”

  He stared back at me, then covered my outstretched hand with his: warm, light.

  “Let’s go somewhere, Esme. Let’s go now.”

  We checked into that hotel on Sunset, famous as a celebrity getaway; this afternoon there were neither celebrities nor the people they were trying to get away from. I looked up at the Regency ceilings; the lobby of dignified shadows made me feel more sober and mature, less impulsive—as if I’d weighed this decision for years instead of minutes.

  We stood side by side on the elevator, saying nothing, staring straight ahead.

  “I like your shoes,” Jesse offered finally, lamely; we stared in silence at my black suede pumps.

  After room service had brought a bottle of chilled chardonnay and a silver bowl of delicately perspiring grapes, pears, and plums, and
after the heavy walnut door had closed with finality, Jesse poured a glass of wine for me and one for himself. I sat down in a chintz-covered chair near the window, overlooking a courtyard full of blue-blooming jacaranda trees and a bluer pool. Jesse stood awkwardly near the desk. Neither one of us looked at the bed.

  “I’m not going to say ‘I can’t believe I’m here,’ nothing disingenuous,” I said after a few minutes. “I do believe that this is real, that I’m here. I want to be here.”

  He smiled from across the room.

  I sipped my wine. Suddenly he was kneeling at my feet. He lifted the wineglass out of my fingers and set it aside.

  We began kissing and moving—caught up in some sort of underwater motion that beached us finally on the bed, him on top of me. I was laughing, thinking, No more good-bye in a Thai restaurant; he was laughing too. He kissed exactly the way I remembered—his whole mouth over mine, like Ollie sucking on an orange half. It was mildly disconcerting at first, then completely absorbing.

  I sat up suddenly, pulling back from him.

  “OK. OK, so I’m disingenuous—this is really happening, right?”

  He’d wrenched free his tie and his shirt was half open, revealing his dark chest hair and the beautiful olive sheen of his skin. He sat up next to me, touching my half-unbuttoned blouse. He cupped my face in his hands.

  “This is really happening,” he said.

  I turned away from him again and he turned my head back to face him straight-on. His eyes were direct and inquiring—a bar of lamplight clarified his expression, as if he were just under the surface of an element slightly more viscous than water, a colloidal suspension, clear. His face shimmered, then stilled.

  “Don’t go off in your mind, Esme,” he said. “Stay here.”

  “I’m here!” I snapped. “OK?” Then, to my shock, I began to cry. Tears slipped out of my eyes and down my face, flowing over his hands and over my own hands, cupped over his.

  “Christ.” I squeezed my eyes shut and breathed deeply, but the tears kept welling up and ran over. So I abandoned myself to it: I didn’t sob, but made a series of lengthy inaudible statements that collected themselves, finally, into sounds of grief.

  Jesse held me in his arms and rocked slowly, kissing my hair. How long had it been, I thought, since someone held me like this? Exactly the way I hold Ollie?

  “Shhh, shhh, Esme.”

  After a long while, I got my breath, and the tears fought to the surface one last time, then ebbed.

  “Well,” I said, dabbing at my eyes with a bedside tissue. “That was fun! Did you come?”

  He covered my lips with a finger.

  “Shh. Esme. Whatever you do right now, don’t be funny.”

  So I wasn’t. I wasn’t funny at all, I didn’t sneer, no wisecracks, as we lay back down and slowly moved together through the ancient portals of that ludicrous, profound cliché of human passion. We touched each other with immense wonder, there was no laughter or even an abstract smile when he slid his tongue over my breasts, between my legs, as I sucked his cock. There was a hint of levity, but it was the other levity, meaning lightness, that quality or state of being light in weight, unfettered, even defiant of gravitation—we floated through each other like subatomic particles. ... No. I’ll say it right: We stayed exultant in our own flesh, our own blessed bodies; there were no subatomic plots, no cloud cover: Jesse and Esme fucking each other. Jesse pushing suddenly deep inside me, me shouting something as he entered, him lifting me up so that I sat on his thighs; we faced each other as he moved, both of us gasping with pleasure. Then we were turning over and over again, as if we’d been spun up from under water into a breaker line; I was adrift on my back, my stomach; he was over me, under me. We kissed frantically, our bodies soaked with sweat; he clutched my hair, pulling my head back, and groaned, moving faster inside me, then triggered a lengthening spark at the center—a long moment—slow levels of ascension, one by one—then I came, then he came, we came talking into each other’s mouths, sliding rung by rung back down the humming spiral. And only then did I make a sound—then I laughed, I laughed helplessly, my hand shielding my eyes from the glare, for a very long time.

  I parked the car at the curb instead of pulling into the driveway. But the living room lights were on and I could see Jay inside, getting up to peer out the window. I opened the door. Behind him, the TV blared. I walked over and snapped Letterman off. There were a few, not too many, Bud cans on the floor.

  He came up behind me and I turned and looked into his eyes. He was still pretty sober.

  “Hi, Jay.”

  “Hello, Esme. D-do you want to tell me where you’ve been?”

  I glanced at the wall clock. It was almost one. I dropped my bag and briefcase on the floor and sank into a chair.

  “You were with s-someone, weren’t you? You didn’t work late, did you?”

  “No,” I said. “I had a drink with someone I used to know. I just forgot about the time.”

  He sat down directly across from me.

  “Wh-who was it?”

  “It doesn’t matter, Jay. You don’t know him.”

  “It m-matters to me.”

  “Jay, I’m sorry. I can’t tell you.”

  I was still in a daze. Jesse and I had made love a second time, more slowly and less explosively but with a languorous, vertiginous detail that stayed in my blood, walked in the door with me. My body felt utterly calm, but my mind struggled to understand, to make sense of what the flesh so readily absorbed—pleasure, joy, terror.

  I looked at Jay, dazed, guilty.

  He got up, shaking his head at me. He began to pace around the room. “I s-stayed up, Esme. I had a funny feeling where you’d gone and I wanted to be ... awake to see you when you came in, to hear what you had to say. Now I n-need a drink.”

  He stomped off to the kitchen, then turned and came back.

  “I want to know, Esme. Did you sleep with this person?”

  “Jay, please. Let’s drop this now.”

  “What do you expect me to do? Ch-cheer when you come in in the middle of the night, looking like ... l-looking goddam happy. What the fuck am I supposed to say?”

  I stood up, angry. “You’re supposed to say, ‘What’s wrong?’ What’s wrong with my marriage if my wife goes out to have a drink and comes back looking happier than when she left? What’s wrong with my marriage if my wife and I can’t talk to each other? What’s wrong if my wife feels free when she leaves me?”

  “You felt free? You did sleep with the guy! Am I r-right?”

  “Jesus!” I cried. “So what? Yeah! I slept with him.”

  Jay reached out suddenly and pushed me, hard, with the flat of his hand. I stumbled backward, holding my arm where he’d slammed it.

  “Get away from me. I can’t look at you!”

  “Oh? This is all about you, just you?”

  “Tell me something!” he shouted, pointing his finger in my face. “Are you going to see this guy again?”

  I swallowed. Jesse and I had had a talk, each of us shaky, absolutely stunned by the implications of what we’d done. It was simple, impossible. Anyway, I knew Jesse. He always had another plane to catch.

  “No,” I said. “I am not going to see him again. We talked. I have a child who means everything to me and I don’t want to shake up her world and make life any harder for her than it already is right now.”

  I stared off into space.

  “Anyway,” I said, “he’s leaving tomorrow.” I smiled involuntarily. “Flying back to the East Coast.”

  Relief broke across Jay’s face, became quickly distorted into an odd resolve.

  “You th-think I’m going to forget this, Esme—don’t you?”

  “Jay, I’m sorry. I didn’t do this to hurt you. I did it for myself. One time. I needed this one time. I needed to make something clear.”

  He laughed bitterly. “Make something c-clear. You’re always making things clear to yourself, aren’t you? Just this one time: y-your
theory, y-your universe. Meanwhile, you’re a goddam failure as a wife. Did I ever tell you that?”

  “Jay.”

  He started for the kitchen again, then turned back again. He threw the words at me like stones.

  “You’re p-pathetic in bed, unreachable. I hope this guy you were with didn’t have to work as hard as I have t-to. ...”

  “Jay, come on. Stop now.”

  “See you later, Esme. I’m going out now for a while. Maybe I’ll make a f-few things clear to myself too.”

  “Be my guest,” I said, but I muttered it under my breath and I’m sure he didn’t hear me. He was out in the kitchen then, banging things, and I was suddenly very tired. I left my briefcase on the floor and went to bed, turning in my exhaustion to the remaining broken gold fragments: Jesse’s face, lamplight, our cries, familiar and lost, coming down through the clouds.

  Chapter 11

  THE DAY EVERYTHING changed was the day I got a letter from my mother describing her marriage to Q: “We drove up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Kendall’s birthplace, as you know, Esme—and were married in a little chapel in Strawberry Bank, in pouring rain. A brief honeymoon in Bar Harbor, then back to Boston. How’s my precious Ollie?”

  I loved the “as you know, Esme”; I laughed out loud when I read it. As a matter of fact, I had no idea where Q was born, to me it was if he’d sprung full-grown, like one of Ollie’s drawings, a homunculus from a petri dish in a sacred grove, under the gaze of a human-faced star.

  I took the letter and sat down in my favorite chair and stared at the “Kittery, ME” postmark on the envelope of my mother’s letter for a while, sipping a cup of nearly cold blackberry tea. Then I glanced at the other mail. There was an official-looking communication from the Los Angeles Unified School District, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. J. Tallich. It was a report on Ollie’s progress in kindergarten. She was being recommended for a special-ed program for attention-deficient children. A personal note from her teacher at the bottom explained that some testing had been done and though it was too early to tell, it looked like Ollie needed help. It said that she was not hyperactive; it had been determined that she did not “yet” need behavior-modifying drugs like Ritalin, but she had a great deal of trouble concentrating for more than a few seconds on anything. There was a second letter from the Los Angeles Unified School District. It said that Ollie was a potential candidate for the Magnet program for gifted children and that I should fill out an application form to get her name on the list now.