Beneath the Neon Egg

by Thomas E. Kennedy

  Down in the concrete yard space, a sheaf of discarded doors is tilted up against the dilapidated fence, weather-rotted wood, rusted hinges.

  His sink is in front of the window he looks out of, and sometimes he stands at this sink brushing his teeth while a woman brushes her teeth at the kitchen sink across the way, one floor below. Sometimes she wears only a bra or is bare-breasted and the vision of her vibrates in his spirit, beautiful as the dawn, those sweet miracles of her breasts. But now there is no one in any of the windows. He looks from the one to the other of them, half a dozen still-lifes on a brick wall, empty, motionless.

  He rinses out his coffee cup, thinks of Liselotte. His anger is past, and he begins to examine what has happened. He should have known better. Of course, he did know better but allowed himself to believe that she was not looking for something he could not give her or would not give her, something he has lost perhaps, or used up. Maybe it was just the difference between men and women. Or was he, in fact, using her? For his pleasure? Without a worry how it might affect her?

  Am I a bastard? he wonders, frightened by the possibility. Or only enmeshed in my guilty-boy stuff? And he remembers his son thinking his own father would leave him out on the street. But Tim and I worked that out. I reassured him. It is possible to resolve problems.

  From next door he can hear the feet of waltzing children stepping around the floor of the Kingo Institute of Dance for Children and the occasional barked commands of Miss Kingo, the stringy old turkey of a woman he sees on the street from time to time waddling about on her pigeon toes.

  He thinks of the sheep dog looking up at him, nose quivering in greeting, of the bare-breasted woman brushing her teeth, and the sense of vibration of those images sings in his nerves and echoes back.

  Emotion takes his stomach, and he hurries to the phone and punches in her number. She answers on the third ring, voice flat.

  “I just wanted to hear how you are.”

  “Not well,” she says.

  “Oh.” He waits. She doesn’t speak. “Well, I just wanted to see if you’re okay, maybe you’d like to talk.”

  “I am not okay, but I do not wish to talk.”

  An impulse flares in him to argue, to point out that he stated his position from the start, that she agreed, that she forced this situation. He smothers it. “Well, I just wanted to say that if you want to talk, I’m here.”

  “I do not wish to talk,” she says.

  He stands over the phone, looking at the gray plastic handset in its gray plastic cradle, joined by a coil of glossy black wire. A bizarre object that people talk through, from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world, just like that, punch eight or ten numbers and you got the voice of someone ten thousand miles away.

  Alongside the phone is the crystal she gave him. Intelligence, indeed! He takes it in his palms, cool and smooth. He thinks of radio crystals, channels a message to her, half-expecting the phone to ring. Then he smirks, returns the thing to the window ledge, but on second thought he picks it up again and chucks it into his bottom dresser drawer. Then he thinks once more—it’s nice to look at, to touch, in a cool, desolate sort of way—and returns it to the window ledge.

  Perhaps he should use the situation to get ahead of himself, work. A few pages of translation. Money in the bank. Earn money instead of sulking. But he switches on the television set as he passes it, grabs the remote and surfs.

  On Eurosport, an enormous man in red tights is inside the chassis of a hollowed-out wheelless red car, carrying it red-faced along a track to a background of cheers. On CNN, a woman in a pink jacket says, “Today in Bosnia . . .” On NBC, Jay Leno’s broad-jawed grin is eating applause. On MTV, a young woman with choppy hair says, “In a little while we’ll be seeing viewer home videos!” On RAI, a beautiful woman smiles, speaking Italian. On France 24, a woman’s beautiful face above the words eve jackson, culture, says, “This is my favorite author at the moment . . .” On Danmark 1, the Pink Panther tiptoes down a corridor. On Danmark 2, a lumpy man stands before a weather map. On Sweden 1, a woman in a purple blouse speaks quietly in Swedish. On Sweden 2, a man in a state trooper’s hat says with a flat midwestern American accent, “I perceived that the suspected perpetrator had entered into a Grand Union Supermarket . . .”

  On Eurosport, an enormous man in blue tights is inside the chassis of a hollowed-out blue car, carrying it on bulging wobbly legs along a track while a background voice speaks with hushed strain, “He looks wobbly, but he is moving at a fast pace . . .” On CNN, the woman in the pink jacket is saying, “is not all glum . . .” On NBC, Jay Leno sits at his desk across from a very tall black man. On MTV, a man with green hair and a silver ball on his tongue flails his body in a frightening shadowy room to electronic music. On RAI, a woman on a stage in a low-cut blouse says something in Italian and seems to be listening to what the audience will say to her.

  Bluett watches her face, her wide, beautiful mouth, sparkling brown eyes, her graceful, slender, broad shoulders and the vee of her blouse that draws his eye into the place where her breasts are wedged together in a beautiful valley of flesh. He stares for a moment, listens to her voice, tries to hear words, wonders if it is different to be Italian, to talk to a woman in Italian, does not quite know what he means, pictures himself with this woman, what would he say, how would she respond. The camera pans back and she walks across the stage in a close-fitting minidress, her walk a subtle dance, and he remembers a green-eyed Italian girl named Janine—Janine Belviso, beautiful vision—who was his first . . .

  He kills the picture, sits thinking of Liselotte not feeling good, not wanting to talk. He thinks of calling her again, pictures her once again telling him she was not okay but did not want to talk, pictures those words hurting him again, pictures her using those words to hurt him, using his concern by refusing to allow it to contact her, holding him on the leash of his caring.

  Then he sees himself thinking these thoughts and wonders if he is becoming a strange, suspicious, bitter man, wonders if he is being unfair, small-minded, tells himself to see it from her point of view. She got caught in her emotion, maybe thought she fell in love, and she had to know whether his feelings were similar and when they showed themselves not to be, she had to get away before she made a fool of herself, felt like a fool, or did things that made her feel foolish.

  “To fall in love.” He thinks about that phrase. It seems to him to describe a false situation, a forced situation, a setup where instead of two people being friends, a circumstance is allowed to be flooded over by the biological chemicals of romance that seem to promise something but only lead to a reasonless situation of isolated expectation and mutual frustration.

  Love is a chemical.

  Perhaps it is possible for two people to formulate, to enunciate, their hopes, to live reasonably together. He doubts it. It all seems so hopeless, fruitless. He has had his kids, has done his biological thing, has his kids. That part of his life is over; the kids are still part of his life, but now he wants something more. What, he wonders, does he want now?

  He thinks back on the things he and Liselotte did together, the games they played. He begins to feel foolish. He remembers how they lay in the dark and played with the sex toy they bought, a game of assuming and surrendering power, a game of penetration, how he held her wrists trapped in his left hand while he penetrated her with the toy in his right, watched her face and played to what the expression of her eyes and mouth told him, worked it, playing with the power she had surrendered to him, that she wished him to use on her.

  Then he penetrated her both ways and put his fingers in her mouth, and she put her fingers in him, and their eyes were locked together. It was not sex exactly, it was a kind of pantomime they staged, locking together their bodies in a bizarre embrace that signified a web of emotion that both thrilled and soothed and terrified them.

  Who then had the power? Who controlled the game? We both did, he thinks and wonders if he understands it, if he can understand i
t, some part of him wondering if he is taking revenge on women in this way, another part feeling this is a passion deep-rooted in the play between man and woman, another part telling him to flow mindlessly with it, surrender to it, abandon himself, yet at the same time glimpsing frightening shadows somewhere along that way, around a curve.

  Thinking now about it, about the fantasies they played with, the word games, the way their gaze would lock as they spoke, to relish with their eyes the revelation of hidden dreams, how quickly they had come to that, and for what reason? What had it meant to him and what to her?

  That revelation and observation, was that love to her? Beyond the caring, was it love? What was it to him? He cannot answer.

  It was a game, he thinks, though he cannot be certain that he was not aware of her caught in the trap of what to her was love and to him was a mere game with no consequences for his heart. Yet what did that phrase mean? Consequences for the heart? Are we such flimsy creatures? Eternal mooning teenagers? Eternally trapped in the well of our hormones? Don’t we have the power to take control of these things so that we do not over and over again back ourselves into an emotional corner where the passion and the friendship are slowly corroded and eroded and destroyed by demands for a false, forced loyalty that . . .

  The thought peters out in a dead end and he comes up against the wall of his ignorance. Is it simply that I do not love her? he wonders. I certainly like her. I am attracted to her, feel passion for her, but in truth I do not feel a need to be with her. What does that mean? Is that not acceptable? Is it not acceptable to feel content in oneself finally, to maintain enough distance to keep from drowning in another person? Have I been unfair, unkind to her? Used her?

  One thing, he thinks, what he experienced with Liselotte was a quantum of difference from what he experienced with Benthe and Dorte. With Liselotte he was fully engaged. With Benthe and Dorte, beautiful as Benthe was, it was—what? Mechanical? Planned? Unengaging? Lacking in intimacy. Yes, it was lacking in intimacy. He thinks of what she proposed with the sauna, the group sex. Was he just afraid of it? Afraid of letting himself go? No, no, that was not intimacy, not intimate, he thinks. That was strangers groping at one another, using each other. To be intimate, he thinks, is what? The word suddenly seems foreign to him.

  Intimate. He goes to the shelf where he keeps his dictionaries, pulls down the Webster’s, fat red dilapidated book, remembers how whenever he asked his mother what a word meant she would take out the dictionary and look up the word and often as not it would lead to another word and what began with annoyance to him became a closeness between his mother and him, became . . . intimate.

  He smiles as he finds the word, reads the definition: “. . . belonging to or characterizing one’s deepest nature . . . marked by a warm friendship developed through long association . . .”

  That is exactly the word, he thinks, and he feels triumph, feels as though he has resolved a problem. With Benthe and Dorte it was the opposite of intimacy: Even though they were naked, even though they were crossing the boundaries of liberty with one another’s bodies, it was not intimate, it did not involve their deepest nature. Whereas with Liselotte they were venturing into the deepest nature of one another . . . Is that love? he wonders. The word seems to cheapen their experience together.

  He wonders if he needs help. If he should think about seeing a therapist. But couldn’t it all be resolved with kindness, with intimacy and kindness?

  He rises, goes to the kitchen for a garbage bag, returns to the bedroom and opens the dresser, removes the clear plastic box from behind his socks and looks into it at the flesh-colored toy they used to penetrate one another. How odd it seems now. He feels embarrassed, wonders how many people play with such things.

  Years ago, he remembers, when he was a teenager, a French-Canadian friend of his named Marcel had invited several boys home once when his parents were out and had taken them into the parents’ bedroom to show his friends something in their bureau: a dildo, large and molded with all the veins and contours of an erect phallus. Marcel had taken it into the bathroom and, sniggering, had shown how he could put water in it and squeeze the scrotum so a stream of water squirted out the glans.

  Bluett had laughed with the others, but he had always wondered what it was for, wondered if Marcel’s father didn’t have one of his own, if he had been wounded in the war or something and had to use this thing in place of a real one. And where did people buy such a thing in those days? The one he holds in his hands now in the clear plastic cube is much smaller and is not molded to resemble a penis but is smooth and slender. A butt plug. Comic name. Why is the butt comic? If you got shot or stabbed in the butt it would hurt like hell, but still people would snigger.

  He remembers, after using it, asking Liselotte, “Was it okay?” and her smiling wickedly. “I was in heaven.”

  He wonders where she is now, where he is, and he stuffs the box into the garbage bag and ties it shut, throws it into the refuse pail in the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink.

  In the living room, he sits and looks at the walls where the masks he has collected over the years hang. One brass-plated one from Central Africa with two horns rising from the forehead, the eyes a straight dark line across the bridge of the nose, the mouth a short line below, full brown wooden lips. One from Papua New Guinea, black wood with white seashell eyes, red tongue down to the chin. He has read that that tongue is the emblem of a destructive god, like the Indian mask of Kali on the other wall, bulging eyes and fanged chinless mouth with her long carved tongue extending downward to devour the world, lap it up. He wonders if that is related to appetite, hunger, an interpretation of these things as a source of evil or destruction. Maybe when we desire, we don this sort of mask and become destroyers, he thinks, consuming others to satisfy our need. He wonders how this relates to him, whether it is relevant to consider removing himself from desire, separating himself from the illusion of the material world. He supposes that world—pleasure, ambition, desire—is an illusion of sorts, but considers that that supposition itself might be an illusion whose source is the doomed desire for perfection.

  And still there was his pursuit of intimacy with Liselotte, the exploration of their deepest nature. That could not be wrong. That could not be illusion, that quest. But he realizes now with a certainty what he had only vaguely grasped about what Benthe was after: that it was and is empty illusion.

  Intensely he becomes aware of his solitude, of his brain turning these words and feelings over and over in his mind. Is this what is happening to everyone in the world? Everyone sitting alone and thinking? Or are they trying to escape this kind of thought with any mindless activity—with TV sitcoms, with porn, with pretense—going about and pretending not to be alone, when in fact they are alone. Aren’t they?

  On the narrow corner wall hangs a long, white mask with thick black eyes and dark triangles extending down the cheeks beneath each eye—which his daughter once suggested were tears. Facing out on the wall opposite where he sits are the two most beautiful and frightening, the one a demon mask from Mali, a red-eyed jackal face with carved ribbed horns atop the skull, and beside it a white face painted with red and blue concentric circles, big staring eyes within black sockets. The eyes themselves are a corkscrew of circles that seem to draw one in toward their tiny black vortex.

  This mask was very expensive, and his wife was angry when he brought it home and she learned how much money he had paid for it, but it was something that, despite how it frightened him, he knew he had to own, had to be able to see. He could hypnotize himself watching it, could feel himself entering another world, drawn out of this place of everyday reality into a place of wandering, perhaps—of wandering and arrival, perhaps—someplace very far.

  He wonders now why these objects so fascinate him. Is it because I feel that all faces are masks concealing what truly lies behind them? Or because I feel that the mask face gives greater authority and power to the tiny human creature wearing it? Is it because when we a
ssume an attitude, we take on the character suggested by a mask—ferocity, desire, destruction, clownish mirth—and become that? Or is it because these powerful visages in truth have nothing behind them, are mere shells, dazzling lids upon the emptiness they cover, the emptiness being our maskless selves which only become something by our choice of action, which is the same as the choice of a mask?

  Also hanging among the masks is a North African flute carved in the shape of a phallus. He bought this at the antique market in Brussels because when he picked it up, not yet noticing that it was a phallus, seeing only that it was a flute, he had felt the blood rush into his groin. Then he saw what it was and understood its function and its power, to inspire. This powerful musical penis gives power and music to one’s own penis.

  He had been surprised when he brought this home at his son’s reaction to his wife’s repulsion. “You’re not hanging that on my living room wall,” she had said, and their eleven-year-old Timothy had shrugged. “Mom, it’s just a fertility symbol.”

  He can understand, though, now, why his wife would not want it on the wall of their family room. It looked like something you might use as a toy. He wonders now if the artist who made it—how many years ago, in what African land?—ever used it that way.

  Standing in the corner between the masks is his didgeridoo, one and a half meters long, a eucalyptus branch naturally hollowed by termites, painted brown and black with bands of white dots at the top, bottom, and middle, a mouthpiece of beeswax. His wife had also disliked this. “It’s so drab. Only you would buy something that looked like that.”

  And in what ways did I drive her to rage?

  He takes it up and sits on the floor with it extended on the toe of his shoe, fills his lungs and presses air through the hollow of the wood. The sound is deep, gently rumbling as an om chant. It vibrates in his limbs, enters his blood, calming him, like the chanting voices on Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, in the second movement, chanting a love supreme again and again, like a mantra, like a prayer to whatever power is greater than our own, greatest in the universe.