Bukowski in a Sundress

by Kim Addonizio

  And ten years after I had abandoned stories, I had a viable collection.

  I sold my book, The Palace of Illusions, to an editor who said he loved it. Okay, there are some likable characters. Some of them are funny and know about things like carnival life or professional ice skating or Byzantine architecture. There is also one little bloodsucking sex scene. But I’d like to think that the book’s exploration of the fun house mirrors we encounter as we struggle to make sense of our lives is what spoke to the editor, someone who cared as much as I had come to care, again, about the power and elegance of the short story.

  Imagine a woman, alone and busy writing in a borrowed beach house on the Pacific, getting the call that tells her she has just sold a story collection. She hangs up, a big smile plastered on her face. She’s about to have a margarita and watch a few deer browsing in the tall grass on the spit of land that separates her from the ocean. The sun is easing under the horizon, a breeze is kicking up, and—I shit you not—our heroine is happy, feeling lucky in her chosen work.

  How to Fall for a Younger Man

  HE’S LOUNGING ON your couch, a bottle of beer held between his thighs. You’ve gotten together to play some music after meeting in a blues band workshop. You’d been playing harmonica alone for years, and were ready, if not for the big time, at least to try the next step. During ten weeks of practice and a performance, you thought of him as that kind-of-cute young guy. You weren’t remotely interested then; you were too busy freaking out about your playing. When he came over with his guitar tonight, mostly what you thought about was how tentative he seemed, how lacking in self-assurance. This was pretty much how you felt, too, as you struggled together to find some musical common ground. In the band, he had played lead guitar, laying down searing licks on his Telecaster, but now you are trying to be an acoustic duo, and it’s a whole different story.

  You walk toward him, carrying your beer. You sit at the opposite end of the couch, and all of a sudden you notice his eyes. You’ve never really looked at them before, not right into them, as you find yourself doing now, and without thinking, you say, “Wow, you have pretty eyes.”

  This is how you start up with someone in an entirely wrong generation for you.

  His eyes are green. He looks as though he could be Native American or Mexican; in fact, he is half Lebanese. He has long black hair and the cutest little mustache and Vandyke, both stubbly and barely there. He is big and handsome and young—how young? Shove that thought back under where it belongs—and by the end of the evening the two of you are making out on your couch. It’s been a long time since you’ve made out with anyone. Go swoony with pleasure; feel as though your mouth has gone to the circus. Feel like an aerialist somersaulting above the crowd, a tiger leaping through a hoop of fire. Blue cotton candy and raspberry Sno-Kones and fresh apples dripping with soft caramel, colored lights whirling in your veins.

  Somewhere between putting his tongue in your mouth and wrapping his big arms around you, he lets slip that he is twenty-eight.

  You’re fifty-four.

  Fucking God.

  Tell yourself you thought he was older. Mid-thirties, at least. You had hoped nearer to forty—there is something about him that feels world-weary—even though you knew this was pure self-delusion. But twenty-something, truthfully, had never entered your mind.

  Say these words, firmly and loudly, as you pull away from him:

  “You can’t stay.”

  Get up and go to the bathroom to absorb the information that you have been lusting after someone about a minute older than your daughter. Think of the unfairness of it: why, of all the men out there, do you have to be attracted to this one? Remember the men you met online: the one who sniffed your armpit, the therapist whose diagnosis of sleep apnea for some reason precluded a second date, the lawyer who discussed the Ebola epidemic. Feel as though you have been given an adorable puppy and had it yanked away. Tell yourself you absolutely cannot sleep with him. Say to yourself, Please please please please please.

  There is another factor to shore up your resolve: you have a vaginal infection. Last week you went to the gynecologist and mentioned that the one time you tried to have sex in the past three years, it hurt quite a bit. She wrote you a prescription for estrogen cream, explaining something horrific about thinning vaginal walls, loss of elasticity and moisture, and other things you did not want to know about the misogynist tricks that aging plays on the female body. You started using this cream, though you didn’t think there was much likelihood you would actually need it. Maybe the cream caused the irritation. You also went out and got that one-shot medicine for yeast infections, just in case. Right now your vagina, along with being full of various medications, is itchy and sore.

  Think about the word vagina, a word you hate. Why isn’t there a good word for it, analogous to cock or dick? Good, strong, sexy words. Cunt doesn’t do it for you. Coochie, snatch, hoo-hah, twat, box, pussy, slit, gash, muff, beaver, Down There, fur burger, pink taco—you want a new word. You want equality with men, who don’t have to deal with mysterious pelvic dysfunction, who can just get it up (even if they need Viagra) and get off. Envy men their simple plumbing. Ready, aim, fire. If there is ever a cure for baldness, the disparity will be complete.

  Pee and then wipe carefully, wincing. Imagine, but do not say, You are so young that fucking you would practically be child abuse and I don’t know if I can even have sex anymore and besides my pink taco is full of goo and I am as old as the hills, the ones that appeared three hundred million years ago. Imagine wiping the happy expression in his eyes right out. Imagine him running off without his guitar. Instead, say this:

  “I can’t have sex with you. I’ll drive you back to BART.”

  “Okay,” he says. “But I’m staying over. You can’t drive—you’ve been drinking.”

  “But all I had was a beer.”

  “You’re small,” he says. “It might be too much to drive on.”

  Wonder if you can muster the will to make him leave anyway. There is some strange force operating, rendering you incapable of saying the words, Go home. Think of asking him to sleep on your couch, or on the single daybed in your studio. Let the strange force guide you to a compromise: he can sleep in your bed, but with all his clothes on.

  Go into the bathroom and put on a tank top and sweatpants. Insert a little more goo into your fur burger, both to soothe it and to stay strong. In bed, curl up away from him under the covers. Within minutes he moves over and wraps his arms around you, his twenty-eight-year-old hard-on nestled against your back. Lie awake most of the night, wondering what the hell you’re doing.

  In the morning, make espresso. Let slip these words: “God, you’re cute.” You’ve already spent the night with him; a little compliment, at this stage, couldn’t make things any worse.

  “You’re beautiful,” he says.

  Drive him to BART before he tries to seduce you, before you mention your age and your hoo-hah. Make out with him some more at the BART station, kiss after kiss tumbling out like clowns from a tiny car. Greasepaint. Spangles and sequins. Watch him walk away, carrying his guitar, his long hair tied back.

  • • •

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK, he is at your door, a bottle of good pinot noir in hand. Someone has raised him properly, someone probably your age. Imagine you and his mother could be friends. You could hang out together, go shopping for cute clothes, and her cute son could take them off you.

  Sit awkwardly side by side on the couch, like thirteen-year-olds. Soon his mom will drive you to the junior high dance, where you can tentatively hold each other as you slowly shift your weight from foot to foot while a band comprised of high school students blasts Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix covers. Is he waiting for you to make a move? Remind yourself you are the experienced one. Two husbands and never mind how many lovers. Remind yourself that when you were standing in the Rockville, Maryland, courthouse reciting
vows to your daughter’s father, vows that would last about a year, this man was lolling in a playpen, clutching a tattered blanket, sucking on a pacifier.

  Imagine sober, mature individuals urging you to come to your senses. They stand in your living room just beyond the coffee table, holding megaphones, saying, “MOVE AWAY FROM THE COUCH.” Your daughter is among them. But it’s too late. You are under some sort of spell cast by the Attraction Fairy. She has tossed her glittery handfuls of dust. It spirals down around you, clinging to your hair and clothes. You are trapped in a snow globe, two figures on a couch under heavy glass.

  There is no escape. Not even Houdini could get out of this.

  • • •

  HE HAS AN OLD Acura his dad gave him. The paint is patchy, the front fender crumpled. Chili pepper lights and Mardi Gras beads hang from the rearview. The front bumper is held on with wire, the passenger side-view mirror with white strips of plastic. To operate the passenger window, he takes a straightened piece of wire hanger, sticks it into the mechanism on his door, and your window goes down. The seats look like an FBI SWAT team stormed in there and cut them open looking for a drug lord’s cocaine stash.

  “Sorry about the seat covers,” he says sheepishly.

  Say: “I don’t give a shit about your seat covers.” At this point you are telling the truth.

  When you finally tell him how old you are, say first, “I was born in a small town in Romania nine hundred years ago. I’m a vampire.” See how good fifty-four sounds?

  “I don’t care how old you are,” he says. At this point he, too, is telling the truth.

  • • •

  ACCEPT AN INVITATION to read at a literary festival in Ohio. The state, as far as you can tell, consists of two-lane highways, a lot of trees, and rain. Listen to the grad student driver chat with the writer in the front seat about Wittgenstein’s propositions, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the dominant aesthetic of the PhD program. Look out at the wet green trees and think about fucking your new young love.

  Feel slightly separated, as though your molecules were scattering away from you in all directions, or maybe as though you were a sheet of Arctic ice breaking into floes. This is the Swoon: the early-stage chemical high that causes freak behaviors like staring into each other’s eyes for minutes at a time and kissing for hours and, in some cases, disappearing together for days. Remember you have experienced the Swoon before. You know it is going to end one day, possibly badly. Think of the last time you saw an ex-boyfriend who was your community college student. You went to his apartment and, sobbing, gathered up a few things you’d left there, while he stared at the floor as though a small spaceship were going to land in that spot, hit him with a beam of light, and shrink him down so he could join the tiny aliens on their journey to a distant universe in which you did not exist.

  You swooned for your daughter’s father; you sat in his kitchen soon after you met, thinking I want to have your child, before you did just that. Remember sitting on a bench in front of a coffeehouse with him, feeling he was the best friend you’d ever had. When you got divorced, your best friend kept both the cars you owned rather than let the mother of his child drive one of them during the rainy season. Your second husband left you after nine months of marriage. He also left his eighty-gallon aquarium, which steadily leaked water onto the bedroom floor. One by one, the fish died. You took to driving over to his place and kneeling in front of his door, yelling curses through his mail slot. Later you got back together for a while, but then there was that little misunderstanding over your money and, once again, quite a bit of yelling on your part. Your new lover is probably too young to have a lot of memories of relationships that started in bliss and ended in the toilet. Possibly he is more optimistic about such things. Possibly he hasn’t given any of this a thought.

  As you cruise past more trees, past fake log cabin storage units and a billboard for relief from spinal compression, the conversation in front has moved on. Perloff, Sontag, Artaud, Homer. Feel like a blissful idiot, remembering your lover carrying you from room to room, your arms around his neck, your legs around his waist—an ape baby being carried by her ape daddy. Consider that if you had to, here in Ohio you could perform a few simple tasks, like signing the word for food. The parts of your brain dealing with higher cognition seem to have gone missing. In their place, little replicas of your boyfriend have taken up residence—one cooking you breakfast, another washing your dishes, a third playing an impassioned solo on “Pride and Joy.” He’s your little lover boy. He has unclogged your bathroom sink, enfolded your hands in his in a restaurant booth, given you a little inlaid box from Lebanon with prayer beads inside. You have history now.

  The writer in the front seat is telling the driver how David Halberstam, the New York Times journalist, was killed. A grad student picked him up at the airport to drive him to a talk at UC Berkeley. They got in a car crash. Here in Ohio the rain is heavy; realize you may be killed any moment, in a similar fashion.

  This is another thing happiness does: convinces you that your life is about to end. Feel glad you sent a friend the poem you wrote for your new love. At your funeral, she will hand it to him, crying. He will be devastated by your death, but he will know how much your brief time together meant. This grief and knowledge will fuel his art and make him a better man. He will love and remember you always and dedicate his first album to you. Though he will go on to love other women, none of them will stir his heart or move him as you have done. You will never have to pull out of the free fall, to take up the burden of a Mature Relationship. This you define as a relationship that has to be Worked On constantly, like a stretch of broken highway being repaired by a chain gang.

  Think to yourself, I don’t want to work on the chain gang. I want to swoon forever. I want to keep flying.

  • • •

  YOU ARE CRYING, sitting on his lap, your arms around him. Why does he feel like your father sometimes, when he is young enough to be your son? He might say you knew each other before, in a past life. He’s a very spiritual person, in a non-projectile-vomiting kind of way. It’s one of the things you love about him. You’d like to believe in past lives. Sometimes you feel that life is an amazing, perfectly tuned musical instrument, one that is also somehow alive, a beautiful, benevolent organism. Then again, you often feel it’s all meaningless chaos and noise, everyone caught in a churning machine, ground under and recycled little plastic thingies that started out as humans and will soon become new trash bags or carpet fibers.

  Wail softly. Say, “You’re twenty-eight. Soon you’ll move on. I’m just a part of your journey.”

  “Well, I’m a part of your journey, too,” he says. “When I look at you, I see you. I don’t see age.”

  Think, Maybe he does see me. Think of how you love everything about his body, even if it isn’t perfect, because it’s his. Love his scars and stretch marks, the shape of his hands, the way sweat streams off him when he’s onstage playing guitar.

  Be so in love you let him take you camping. Set up house, a tent by a river. Pee in the long grass among the cow pies. Lie on a blanket sharing wine and crackers, looking up at the stars. Take the mushrooms he’s brought and float downriver on yellow inner tubes, coming on to the high, your body shivery and the grass and air liquid and the world a part of you, moving when you move. Be so in love you sleep on the floor on an air mattress in his sister’s living room where he is staying now. Let him move in with you part of the week. Miss him on the days he goes back to his sister’s. Travel with him to Seattle, where he plays guitar for your reading. Go to Lebanon, where you meet all his uncles and aunts and cousins, where you read in cafés in Beirut and see the cedars in a snowstorm during a harrowing ride up and down the mountain. Visit the village his father lived in as a child, and listen to the muezzin’s voice floating the evening prayer on loudspeakers over the darkening valley. There used to be foxes; they are gone now. The house with the garden is a ruin. On Vale
ntine’s Day, go to the memorial commemorating the anniversary of Prime Minister Hariri’s death from a car bomb in the middle of Beirut. A sign on a mosque bombed by the Israelis says, WE WILL REBUILD. Go south to see fallen Roman temples, to feed a small sick dog among the broken mosaics that resemble hearts, to try lamb’s brains from a cart; drive north past the tin Palestinian shacks, then stop to eat fresh-caught fish from the Mediterranean and smoke apple tobacco from a hookah. Feel lucky to be there, to be able to be a tourist. Be completely in love.

  In California, go to a barbecue and lie in a hammock together, looking up at the eucalyptus trees. The leaves are lit from beneath by the flames coming off the grill. Hot dogs, burgers, potato salad, pie. Kids and dogs roaming around, musicians setting up on a homemade stage near the house. Feedback. A twanging string. A field where horses move quietly through the dark. You’re rolled up together, snug and safe.

  Say, “Let’s enjoy it now, before it all turns to shit.”

  Laugh.

  • • •

  FIGHT ALL THROUGH Thanksgiving as you cook a big meal together. Declare a cease-fire in time for him to put your dough initials on the crust of the pie he’s baked. Not really your initials, but the initials of what you’ve come to call your alters, like the alternate identities in multiple personality disorder. His is a simple man named Pepe, easygoing and happy, a communer with nature; yours is Lola, a precocious sprite perennially turning five. Pepe and Lola never argue about money, or about whether one likes her wine a little too much or the other relies on his medicinal marijuana a bit too often. They cuddle and play card games and binge-watch TV series. Unlike Kim and her boyfriend, they are perfect for each other.