“It must have lasted for, I don’t know, fifteen or twenty seconds before it stopped. It stopped the very moment I consciously realized that I was listening to something … what? Unearthly?
“But it was so beautiful, Don. It was like … too beautiful, you know?
“I actually cried.”
There is a long pause now. The sounds of Wright soothing his throat, a long swallow. He shifts the telephone to his other ear, Donald hears it in the tone change of dead air.
“Anyway, bud. About that last message of mine. About the Big Blonde, remember?”
Wright pauses. He chuckles softly, hoarsely.
“Remember how awkward I always was around women? Well, no more, my friend. No more.”
In the next long silence Donald feels a chill ripple through him. His spine tingles. He feels not alone in the room; watched. He puts on his glasses and looks all around but there is nobody with him, no form nor shadow nor gauzy mist undulating in the air.
“She’s kind of gross, Don, to be perfectly honest about it. She’s no cover girl, that’s for sure. But I don’t know, she’s got something appealing about her, some kind of animal sexiness, I don’t know what it is.
“She’s a big woman. Bigboned. A couple of inches taller than me.
“She’s got a wide mouth and red juicy lips, very red. Huge green eyes that sometimes bulge a little, like a lizard’s maybe.
“Pendulous, soft breasts. Big tits, bud, seriously big.
“She wears too much powder on her face, it’s too white, but even so I can see the pores on her cheeks. Pores as big as blackheads. And the hotter she gets, the bigger the pores open up. Like when we’re dancing, you know? And she’s rubbing up against me, and her hands are flying all over my back, she’s getting sweaty and hot and those big pores of hers are as big as … it’s almost like she’s breathing through them. Jesus, it makes me warm.”
The longest pause of the night now, the chillest silence. Donald’s naked chest is a contour map of goosebumps and rigid hair follicles. Wright’s voice when it returns is different again, flatter, solemner, the voice of a dying man.
“Listen, bud. You haven’t told Jessie any of this stuff, have you? I don’t want you to. And I mean any of it, I don’t want her to know a thing. Remember, you promised.
“I figure she doesn’t know yet or she’d have been over here by now breaking in the windows and force-feeding me chicken soup, that’s the kind of girl she is. You’re a lucky man, Donny, to have a woman like her. And a great kid like Travis. You’ve always been lucky. You were born to win.…
“Anyway, friend, don’t tell Jess about any of this, okay? I know how much it would hurt her. It shouldn’t but I know it would. I don’t want it to hurt you either, okay? I mean it, don’t feel bad about this. All I really want from you is … I don’t know.
“I just want somebody to understand.”
“It’s all muddied up in sex, isn’t it?” Donald asks.
“What is?”
“Everything. Love, death, ambition, power.…”
“We’re sexy little creatures, no denying the obvious. Was, in my case.”
“How many women in all, Jer?”
“Including after St. Croix?”
“There’s sex after death?”
“I’ve heard it referred to as such, but there are more differences now than similarities. Anyway, as for the number of women I knew physically, I don’t remember. Statistics, they’re the first things to go.”
“A hundred and something, that’s what you told me once.”
“Over fifty times more than Wright had, geez. And he’s the one with the ballooning prostate.”
“Looking back, Jer, now that you’ve achieved a different perspective, now that you’re some distance from it, or so I assume—What I mean is, it seemed to me that sex was, in a way, your primary motive for living. It was all you ever talked about, all you cared about, all you did, for chrissakes. Looking back, what do you think of all that now?”
“I think you’ve asked me a damn long-winded question.”
“But as for sex.…?”
“It’s a fun way to spend an hour. But it’s not important. It is no great accomplishment to get laid.”
“Then your life.…”
“I wasted my life. Getting one’s rocks off is dismally small justification for all the money and time and energy I invested in pursuit of an activity even troglodytes were adept at.”
“Then you don’t think Travis should be more interested in sex?”
“What makes you think you know what Travis is or isn’t interested in?”
“You’re right. I don’t.”
“And while we’re on the subject of sex, let me ask you this. What is your attraction to that woman?”
“To Jess?”
“Don’t be coy.”
“Leeanne. Hmmm. Well.…”
“You can’t hold onto me through her, my friend. She’s a different woman than the one I knew.”
“I would certainly hope so.”
“You think you deserve the abuse she heaps on you, right?”
“Just look at me, Jer. I’m a failure. I’m a schmo.”
“What exactly is it you want from life, Donald?”
“What do I want?”
“All of us want something. Even Gandhi did. Even Christ. Me, I wanted to make a ton of money and get laid more often than Johnny Wad. But I don’t think I ever understood what you want.”
“I guess what I want is to know what I want.”
“Dig deep into your psyche, boy. Probe until it hurts.”
“I want Travis to be happy in ways that do not involve suicide. I want Jessie to know how much I love her. I want Deirdre to quit making such a pest of herself. I want Leeanne to realize that being an independent woman doesn’t mean she has to squash every testicle she can get her hands on. I want Wright to wake up tomorrow with a healthy prostate. And I want you, Jer, I want you to be alive and well and kicking my ass in racquetball, just the way you used to.”
“But what about for you? What do you want for Donald?”
“All those things are for me.”
“I mean just for you. For you and nobody else. Be honest, kid. What is it you want?”
“I don’t want to be erased like a misspelled word.”
There had once burned in him a passion as pure as flame.
There once shone a light so brilliant as to blind him to all the obstacles to his ideal. But the flame is lower now, it barely keeps him warm. The light is dimmer, no longer a beacon, but a tiny distant star.
He has made a compromise with mediocrity. He has turned away from that original fire of ambition, that passion to be strong and brave and alone, a voice above the crowd. He was turned away finally by an inferior kind of hunger. Seduced away by the lure of easy comfort. Suckered away by self-doubt and loneliness and fatigue, his voice grown hoarse from too much shouting toward which too few listeners ever turned to hear.
He has a talent but he does not do his most to nurture it. He gives himself too many rests. He looks too closely at what the world wants, what it rewards, and he culls back his own expectations so as to reap some of those rewards. And so the rage in him becomes two-sided; the handle of the knife he holds becomes itself a blade.
He assumes responsibility for others before fulfilling responsibilities to himself. He becomes an old man half a lifetime early. Old because he has given in to what he despises. Old because he has ceased to believe the impossible. Old because he has lost all faith in the sparkling beauty of his dreams.
Donald is dreaming about Travis as a little boy, Travis is four, he and Donald and Jessica are camping fifty yards back from a fast and muddy river. Their tent is as big as a cabin and bright yellow and Jessica is seated near the campfire, popping popcorn. It is dusk, nearly dark, a gray August night. The only colors are those illuminated by the fire, everything else in varied shades of gray or black. Travis moves between the tent and the noisy rive
r, gathering wildflowers. Donald in his dream has trouble locating himself. Is he there at all? Yes, there he is, over there, he is standing upriver. Doing what? Doing nothing. Staring at the muddy rush of water, the endless churn of brown.
Suddenly Jessica screams. Donald pivots. She is rigid, a fire-lit spectre of absolute fear, finger pointing toward the river. With one sweeping glance uninterrupted by the figure of a boy Donald knows what has happened and he dives in, he flings himself far out into the thick swirling chill. Stroking hard, kicking hard, Donald struggles to keep his head high as the hard current whisks him past the campsite, his eyes fighting mud and darkness. Travis! he cries gurgling, Travis honey where are you? Daddy’s coming! But there is no reply, no shadow of a small bobbing head to break the roiled surface.
And now somehow Donald is on shore, wet clothes heavy and cold as he races madly through a thicket, jagged branches snapping like whips against his face, twigs stabbing his head, Get me a flashlight! I can’t see anything!, and he is nearly crazy with the terror of loss, directionless, he doesn’t know where to look, to run.
Now he is on a high stone bridge peering down and he thinks this is like a dream and yes! there goes Travis clinging to a log shooting by beneath the bridge. Daddy’s coming honey hang on! and feetfirst into the river Donald goes, I’ve got him now, I’ll save him now.
But instead of bobbing abruptly to the surface Donald’s body continues speeding down, a torpedo cutting through the muck, he scoops wildly and kicks but he cannot reverse his descent, he is a mile below the surface and still diving, eyeglasses torn off, irretrievable, he had no idea the river is so deep.
He strikes something hard now, he stops, he has bottomed out finally and is standing in the mud. He needs air, his lungs are about to burst, he will never make it to the top. That hard slick object he struck, it is a pale blur beside him but he examines it quickly with his hands and recognizes it finally as a refrigerator, a 19 cu.ft. Frigidaire frost-free with automatic ice-maker wedged obliquely in the sediment. Donald wrestles frantically with the door, it is stuck firm but then pops open, the sucking sound of decompression, he dives inside and the door whooshes shut and he sticks his muddy head out the tentflap just as the popcorn begins to pop and Jessica seated alone dressed all in black beside the blurry fire looks at him impassively and says There’s none for you, don’t even ask.
“You can’t keep doing this, you know.”
“I’m too tense to go back to sleep.”
“That’s no excuse for talking to a dead man.”
“But I enjoy this, it relaxes me.… Your voice gets clearer day by day.”
“You’d better stop while you can.”
“I really miss you, Jerry.”
“Talk to somebody alive for a change. Pick one!”
“I’m annoying you.”
“You think this is all I have to do? You think I don’t have problems of my own?”
“My dreams are destroying my life.”
“Contraria contrariis curantur, my friend.”
“Come again?”
“Fix your life and you’ll fix your dreams.”
“It’s not my life that troubles me, it’s Travis’s.”
“Haven’t been reading your Jung lately, have you?”
“You think Travis in the dream was me.”
“The boy in you, sí.”
“But … I can’t concentrate enough to figure this out.”
“How old are you, Donald?”
“I’m forty-four.”
“Try again.”
“According to my birth certificate I am.”
“Paper lies. How old do you feel?”
“Twelve? Ten? Maybe younger.”
“You are a confused, uneducated boy.”
“I know the alphabet but I don’t know how to spell.”
“You can’t read, can’t fathom the concept of time, can’t speak plainly enough to make yourself understood.”
“I’m three, I guess. I’m one.”
“You don’t know where you came from, have no idea where you’re going. The notions of beginning and end make you dizzy.”
“I’m an embryo. A squiggly newt.”
“You try to consider the self, but the mind cannot look at itself. It casts no reflection.”
“I’m in two places at once. I’m an egg and a sperm.”
“Neither can conceive of the other and yet both feel incomplete.”
“I’m a cell, I’m a molecule. I’m an atom. I’m a quark.”
“How old are you, Donald?”
“I’m too old to remember.”
“How old are you, Donald?”
“I am yet to be born.”
Leeanne reposes like a Siamese cat on a downstuffed chaise in her livingroom. Her red and yellow flowered silk kimono hangs open to reveal one leg bare to the thigh, the other naked to the knee. She holds in her limp hanging hand a blackstemmed flute of champagne, on her face the sleepy satisfied look of one superiorly fucked, supremely screwed, the thoroughbred lathered from its Kentucky Derby win, the greyhound star of Sarasota, Queen of the Honeybees, Empress of the World.
Donald has not yet laid a hand on her. Not so much as a buss on the cheek. He sits across the room from her, just inside the door, perches tenuously on the edge of a hardbacked chair as he stares woodenly at Leeanne’s naked foot, toes twitching rhythmically, nails as bright as blood.
“You should see how big my new orifice is,” she says.
Did he hear that correctly? Was it orifice or office?
“Mateo is fucked now and he knows it,” she says. “I’ve got them all by the balls.”
Donald looks up hoping to identify this room, to place this woman somewhere in his memory, find a reason for his presence here. Leeanne has exposed a breast to him, is circling the nipple with a forefinger dipped in champagne.
“Come get a taste,” she says.
It is a lovely breast, in a detached kind of way. Donald stands, distantly interested, remotely aroused. She opens her robe, holds the flute inclined above her pubic hair, dribbles a dribble of champagne onto the black thatched roof of her corporate hideaway, a shimmer of fruity rain.
Donald unbuckles his trousers although aware that he has no erection. He wants to fuck until he dies but his pecker is dozing soundly. He is a plumber without a plunger, a mechanic sans screwdriver, a toolist devoid of tool.
Donald kneels at the foot of the chaise lounge. Leeanne lifts off his glasses, lays them aside. She raises her ass to him, with one hand pulls his face into her champagne-shampooed hair.
Donald feels so heavy with sadness, the taste of her brings tears to his eyes. He hugs her buttocks and tries to forget whom they are attached to. He hugs her warmth and tries to forget the icy heart.
“So do something,” she says hoarsely, the slippery lips lapping at his face. “Use your tongue.”
Donald is thinking of Jessica now, her soft beauty in bed. The heartbreaking frown she wears sleeping while he, nearly every night these days, tiptoes away, downstairs to his room full of negatives, his undeveloped thoughts. How many times has he stolen past the bed, wanting to wake her tenderly by doing just this, by slipping his tongue inside her, dying between her thighs?
“… a huge mahogany desk,” Leeanne is murmuring. “Plus mahogany filing cabinets. A wet bar. A view Mateo would kill for.” She purrs throatily, chuckles throatily, a dangerous laugh.
Donald realizes suddenly that his plumber’s helper has sprung awake. That the only way he can make love to his mistress is by fantasizing about his wife.
He pulls away, stands up, zips up, blinking, dazed, and plucks a hair off his tongue.
“Get with it, mister,” Leeanne growls through her teeth. “Your tongue or your dick, let’s see some action.”
She is fuzzy around the edges, her face a blur. Donald leans closer, squinting. “Where did you put my glasses?”
She holds up the champagne flute. His eyeglasses are submerged inside, bubbly. He
reaches for it but she pulls away. “Not until you’ve done your duty.”
He lunges for the flute, misses, splats on his face, white shag up his nose.
“What’s your problem?” Leeanne wants to know.
Donald addresses the floor. “I don’t like you,” he says, “and I want to go home.”
Leeanne takes a moment to consider this, assimilate, formulate, extrapolate. Calmly, with executive aplomb, she stands. Marches into the kitchen. Pours the champagne from her glass into the sink. Lays Donald’s eyeglasses inside a marble mortar, grips the phallic-shaped pestle, grinds his lenses to dust.
Carrying the mortar, she returns to him. Stands with one foot on each side of his head. Pours the dust of his eyeglasses like snow on his chest.
“Let’s see you go home now, asshole.”
Donald studies the glitter of broken light that has fluttered atop his hands. “Those glasses were guaranteed unbreakable,” he says.
Leeanne returns to the chaise now. She yanks open her robe, flops down, knees raised, legs slightly spread. Donald stands, shimmering splinters raining to the floor. “From now on,” Leeanne announces, “I tell you when you can come, and I tell you when you can go. Understood?”
Donald nods once. Then he turns. Through the blur of his myopia he moves, walking and swimming, an underwater flamingo, toward what he presumes and hopes is the door.
“And where the hell do you think you’re going?”
It is the door! The knob, the lovely knob, he pulls it toward his groin.
“You get your pathetic ass back here, mister. I’m not through with you yet!”
Donald swims out into the hallway, the night. He locates his car finally by feeling and squinting his way up the street. Drives by instinct, astigmatic homing pigeon, swerving to avoid sudden blurs. He side-swipes only two street signs along the way, destroys only one headlight.
Under the Rainbow Page 4