When Watched

by Leopoldine Core

“Yes.”

  “It doesn’t,” he said with disgust. “You’re a fantasy addict.”

  “I’m a writer,” she shot back.

  “So write then. Tell the truth.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t. I don’t know how.” She was holding back a sob. “I’m always gonna be like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “A monster.”

  George stared, his dark eyes softening. “So write about that.”

  The walls were glowing—pinker suddenly—like a sunset in the womb.

  “What if no one cares?” she said. She couldn’t imagine anything worse.

  “Don’t think so much about the future.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because,” he said carefully, “it doesn’t belong to you.”

  “Okay,” she said. She was starting to feel a little angry. She pulled a cigarette from the pack on her side table and lit up. “So what does belong to me? Nothing? I’ve got nothing, right?”

  “No. Not nothing. Come on. Not nothing.”

  “What then?” she said, smoke charging from her nostrils.

  “You have this,” he said. “Today. Not tomorrow.”

  She ashed onto the floor. “I’m not stupid.”

  “I know that,” he said and a train of red hearts floated by. She touched one and it laughed in transit, then vanished.

  “But am I crazy?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he grinned. Then all around the room she saw it towering in giant black letters, the word: YES. YES. YES.

  She dragged on her cigarette and exhaled, then felt her cheeks warm up and wanted badly to be kissed.

  “Give me a puff, will you?” he said and she held the cigarette to his lips. He took a long suck, then blew a skinny cloud. “Again,” he said and she returned the cigarette to his mouth. He seemed to take all the time in the world inhaling. It felt religious. Then smoke poured from his mouth in a slow, sensual manner, crawling up through the air like a herd of lazy white lizards.

  “Alright,” he said and she dropped the cigarette in an old glass of water by the bed. Hearing it sizzle, she said, “I’m just a slow writer.”

  “Who needs to play,” he smirked.

  “What I need is quiet.” She felt a speech gathering in her thoughts and contained it. “I’m not gonna talk about my process,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s too boring. I mean, I hate when writers talk about their process. They always look so proud of what they’re saying, like it’s the frosting on the cake.”

  “But it’s the shit on the shoe.”

  “Right!” she exclaimed, then stared into his dark grin. It was a face both warlike and unprotected, which was exactly what she wanted from a man: something open and shut.

  “Why am I in the story?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Cause I can’t stop thinking about you.” She blinked thoughtfully. “If I’m gonna write about myself, I have to write about you. You’re in my head.” She stared hard at him. He didn’t seem to mind. He must be used to it, she thought, which felt a little sad. Like he was a very special monkey.

  “In the story you’re dying of cancer and you’ve kind of accepted it,” she explained. “You keep saying how everyone turns to dust and stuff like that. But I’m going nuts. I don’t want you to die. I’m sitting by your hospital bed and I keep saying it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair.”

  “What isn’t fair?”

  “That you’re dying!” She stared at him, timid suddenly. “I mean, that you died. How could that be fair? All sorts of schmucks live to be a hundred . . . so they know something you’ll never know.”

  George was quiet. A soft look of violation passed over his face.

  The dead are innocent, she thought, feeling guilty. But she couldn’t stop herself. “I just think I would’ve known how to touch you.”

  “You and every other girl in the world.”

  “Yeah well, every other girl is wrong. Every girl but me.” She sat there staring and felt like a baby, then a fool, then a crazy person. “You’re a creature of another time . . . a time I’d like to crawl into.” She began to cry. “I can’t be young now. I don’t know how. But I could’ve been young then.”

  He just stared. Maybe he didn’t agree that the sixties would’ve embraced her. She herself couldn’t be entirely sure. But it was a feeling and it burned, the feeling of aloneness in her own time.

  “How old do you think I am?” she asked, wiping her eyes.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Twenty?”

  “Actually I’m twenty-eight,” she beamed.

  “No,” he said, grinning in his handsome, ghoulish way. “Really?”

  “Really,” she said seriously because it was a serious thing. “Twenty-eight.”

  “Well,” he said, “you’re doing an honor to your decade.” Then he leaned out of the record cover as if it were a car window and kissed her on the mouth.

  She heard saxophones and seagulls, a hammer hitting a nail. Everything in the world; everything holy and good. It was a wet, biting kiss and it stirred the glittering feeling in her crotch. Soon every cell in her body was glittering too. She hoped it would go on and on and on and somehow lead to sex. But his lips released her and he sank back into the record cover.

  The spit he left on her tongue tasted like black tea and tobacco. There was a third element also, one that began quietly, but soon it was all she could taste. It was the surprising flavor of his flesh itself. Smiling, she thought, No animal tastes alike.

  “God,” she said, her eyes immense. “I like you so much. I might even love you.”

  “Why?” he asked, staring in his deadpan way.

  Then a number rose in his eyes: 2,898,787,775. It was the number of women who loved him and it blazed a sickly yellow.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said quickly. “I didn’t think you’d ask why.”

  “Come on. Tell me.”

  “I like your visions. They make me wet. ‘I Me Mine’—that song makes me wet. I wish you weren’t George Harrison. I wish you were . . .” She touched the bone of his cheek. “I wish you were anyone.”

  “Anyone?”

  “I wish you just like, worked at a deli.”

  “No.” He moved his face from her hand. “You wouldn’t want me then.”

  “Oh but I would! I would see you and I would just know you were wonderful. I would try to seduce you.”

  “What would you do?”

  “I would walk up to the counter.”

  “And then?”

  “You would say hello.”

  “And then?”

  “I would say hello. I would just stand there.”

  “Enticing.”

  “No there’s more.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I would buy you a pickle.”

  He laughed.

  “Or whatever you wanted. It would be like when someone at a bar buys the bartender a drink.”

  She was getting excited and the air knew it. God knew it. Even the little brown spiders in the walls knew and they didn’t scare her. Not now, not tonight.

  “Then I would invite you over,” she continued. “I would bring you to this room and we would crawl onto the bed. I would kiss you but like where no one else has ever kissed you.”

  “Where?”

  “Your eyelids.” She smiled. “Your ass.”

  “Lots of people have kissed my ass,” he smirked.

  “No I mean really kiss your ass. Like with my mouth.”

  “I know what you meant.”

  “Well I would do it differently,” she smiled. “And I would get completely naked. I would even take off my earrings and like if I was wearing lipstick I would rub it off with a Kleenex. Then I would lie on
my back and I would open my vagina with my fingers,” she said seriously. “And in there you would find the whole universe.”

  “The whole universe is in there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve always wanted to see that.”

  “Wait, you’ve always wanted to see what?”

  “Everything.”

  “Me too. That’s why I can’t sleep.”

  “You want a lot.”

  “I do.” She leaned nearer to the record, to the wet heat of his breath.

  “If I saw between your legs,” he said, “what would I see? What does the whole universe look like?”

  “I don’t know. I think of infinity. The blackness of space.”

  “I think of a big yellow field and a little horse walks by.”

  “A little baby horse?”

  “It’s a baby, yeah.”

  “I love that . . . I guess the universe is vast so you have to pick something to look at.”

  He stared. “You haven’t really told me—I want you to tell me exactly . . . why you want me.”

  She stared back. He seemed so insecure—more insecure than George Harrison had to be. Maybe that is all a rock song is, she thought. Discomfort. Horrible embarrassment. Set to a tune.

  “C’mon,” he said. “Why?”

  “It’s just something that happened. I woke up one day—I woke up burning,” she said, loving the words. There was nothing better, nothing more electric than thinking something and saying it immediately. “Have you ever burned, George?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it hard to burn for people when everyone’s burning for you?”

  “Exactly. I can’t match them. I can’t even come close.” He looked away. “In the early days on tour when all the girls were screaming, I couldn’t hear the band. I couldn’t even hear my own voice—just all these screaming girls, you know.”

  “It’s like they were the band—the screaming girls.”

  He laughed and she looked away, smiling uncontrollably. “I love the way you sing,” she said. “I love that I can hear all the spit in your mouth . . . there’s a hiss.” Then, returning her eyes to his, she said, “You wrote all my favorite Beatles songs.”

  “Oh,” he grinned.

  Blushing, she muttered, “I have to pee,” and took the record with her to the bathroom. She leaned it up against the green tile wall, then pulled her underwear down and sat on the toilet.

  “Nice music,” George said as she peed. He laughed and she joined in, quite hysterically. Then she looked at the other three Beatles, who remained flat and devoid of animation. They looked spooky next to George’s breathing face, like deer heads on a wall.

  She flushed and shut the toilet, then sat cross-legged on the cold tile floor, slouching before the record. “There’s such sadness in you,” she said.

  “No that’s you.”

  She frowned. “That’s just the problem. I can’t see what’s inside anyone.”

  “Well,” he laughed, “we aren’t frogs in your laboratory.”

  She smiled sadly. “I know. I just . . . I can’t connect with anyone. I always think I know what someone’s face is saying,” she said, shaking her head. “And I’m always wrong.” She looked down at her naked toes on the green tile floor. “I’m so intense. I repulse people.”

  “I’m telling you, you need to play.”

  “Stop saying that. It’s like you have one idea.” She touched her forehead and grimaced. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just have to finish this story. Then I’ll calm down.”

  “No,” he said. “There will always be another story. You will never be calm.”

  Suddenly he looked exactly like the devil. And she knew he was right. The story loomed, unfinished, one of a lifetime of stories. It was enough to make her scream.

  “In the story we’re talking,” she said anxiously. “Kind of like we’re talking right now. Only something happens.”

  “What happens?”

  “Well I don’t know. That’s the problem.”

  “Does something have to happen?”

  “Yes,” she said and waited for him to make a suggestion. But he didn’t. “What do you think should happen?” she asked. “I mean, what do you think would happen? I want it to feel, you know, real.”

  “What about this?”

  “This now?”

  He nodded.

  She stared at him a minute, then picked up the record and walked swiftly back to her bed. There she began typing all the words that had passed between them, all the ones she could remember.

  Afterward she read over what she had written. She wasn’t sure if it was any good. “God damn,” she said.

  “What?” George said. The record was lying flat beside her.

  “I just feel like such an idiot sometimes.”

  “Well everyone’s an idiot sometimes.”

  She laughed, then stared into space. “Maybe ambition is the great distraction . . . cause it just makes you greedy.”

  “Everyone is greedy. Everyone is exactly the same.”

  She blinked. Maybe George Harrison is crazy, she thought, then reached for the phone. It was heavy and pea green, a rotary phone from the sixties.

  As it rang she held her breath. She always did this. She could never breathe until the human at the other end put a stop to all the ringing—said hello. She decided then—waiting for it—that it was the most romantic word: hello.

  The ringing ceased. She heard her father but not his hello. He just breathed directly into the phone—into her ear. He always did this.

  “Dad?”

  “Saundra, it’s very late.”

  “I know—I’m sorry. I have to ask you something.”

  “Are you alright?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “What have you done? Have you done something?”

  “Daddy, I’m writing. And I think this could be good—like really, really good—but I’m not sure.”

  “Well,” he yawned, “it’s usually a spell, Saundra—the good feeling.”

  “I know that.”

  “You can’t really see a sentence until you feel bad again.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Good.”

  She imagined him touching his mustache as he always did—compulsively.

  “You had a question?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go ahead.”

  She sat up, straightening her spine as if he were there, watching. “Are there any fables or stories where a woman opens her vagina and inside is the whole universe?”

  He was quiet.

  “I’m writing a story where that happens,” she said. “I need to know if I’m writing a story that has already been written.”

  “Well all stories—”

  “Yeah, yeah, they’ve all been written—I know. But has the universe ever shown up in a woman’s vagina?”

  “All the time. Why just yesterday—”

  “Daddy, I’m serious.”

  “Well what do you mean by the whole universe?”

  “I mean the birds, the trees, the entire solar system—everything. The universe, Daddy. The universe.”

  “Well there’s a scene in an Almodóvar movie where a man walks into a woman’s vagina and it’s enormous. But it’s not the universe.”

  “Okay.”

  “And there’s an Italo Calvino story where the whole universe is a woman’s fat arms and breasts. But not her vagina.”

  “Okay.”

  “And then there’s the Courbet painting of the vagina called L’Origine du monde. But it’s not L’Origine du universe.”

  He laughed and then she laughed. They laughed together heartily.

  “You know I was sleeping, Saundra.”

  “I’m sorry
. I had to know. I knew you would know.”

  He was silent. A pleased silence, she thought.

  “You should work in the vagina,” she said. “Like at the front desk of one . . . answer absurd questions like mine all day.”

  “I think I’ve worked in several.”

  She smiled and knew that he was also smiling. It was a weird smile, his was—a secret smile, one obscured by mustache hairs.

  On the pink wall a brown spider made its diagonal dash. A second one followed, then a third and she wondered if an egg had hatched. She didn’t care. She lay there with the phone in her hand, basking in something like sunshine. It was the infinite weirdness of the world and it made her smile again, with her father smiling on the other line, the weirdest man. And she the weirdest woman. And George, blinking beside her, the weirdest Beatle.

  “Good night, Saundra,” her father said.

  She waited for his phone to hit the cradle and imagined him in his navy robe, shuffling back to bed. She saw him part the sheets and enter them. She hung up.

  “How can you say vagina to your father?” George asked.

  “I don’t know. I just can. He’s a professor of German literature.”

  “Oh.”

  “I can’t do anything that normal people can,” she grinned. “But I can do everything they can’t.”

  George laughed.

  “He’s not always so nice—my dad. He can be very cruel out of nowhere.”

  “But you keep calling him. Even though he can be cruel.”

  “Even though.” She picked the record up and looked into his eyes. “I think I’m afraid to finish the book,” she said. “Like finishing the book means death.” She sighed. “I don’t wanna die.”

  “You won’t,” he said. “Your book isn’t you.”

  “What about your music? Was that you?”

  “No. It was just something I did.”

  She glanced at her cigarette pack and decided not to reach for it. She said, “What’s it like anyway, dying?”

  “It’s like nothing,” he said evenly. “Nothing at all.”

  She peered at him. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “You’ll see. It’s like nothing. We really die . . . I did.”

  What he said made her stomach hurt. He had died and not even God could change that. Especially not God, she thought. He was gone, long gone. And the face she was staring into was her own.