The Soho Press Book of '80s Short Fiction

by Dale Peck

  I could just see the top of Brian’s sunny head over the horizon of his chest. Silence, gasps—out of the blue he said, “You would have looked like dynamite in that toga.”

  What if I’m fucking on the grass in ancient Rome like we always do on Wednesday night. Is it Thursday? What’s one day? Nothing—you turn around and it’s dark, the tick and tock of day and night. What if I’m the woman? I’m languidly stretched out on the grass fanning myself with a spray of flowering myrtle. When he enters me I’m spread open as a moth, I’m all colors. What if I’m the guy when I feel someone on me and wham!—I’ve got a cock up my ass—I never saw the guy before and I still haven’t seen him but I ride his cock—why not?—I’m riding it across a continent of skin. I feel like a sandwich, the pleasure’s in the middle because no one has had or knows this much—I can’t see, I’m bellowing and I start to come, it begins in my ass as a pinpoint of light a thousand miles away. I move closer to it with a religious sense of well-being and when I come I shout a little prayer—I shout Je-Sus!

  What if I’m fucking this boy and his orgasm is so absolute it leaves me gasping.

  What if I’m watching the three of them calling on their gods and gasping their extravagance—their arms and legs, their skin filled with rosy orifices, they look like an anemone. First I’m the woman, then I’m the man, then I’m Catullus, then I’m an observer remembering a poem, the distance becoming erotic.

  He’s going to make us into a poem, I’ve heard better lines. What if he takes us to his villa and merely to pluck at my nipples he feeds me olives pickled in caraway, dormice dipped in honey and rolled in poppy seed, sausages, orioles seasoned with pepper, capons and sow bellies, blood pudding, Egyptian and Syrian dates, veal, little cakes, grapes, pickled beets, Spanish wine and hot honey, chickpeas and lupins, endless filberts, an apple, roast bear meat, soft cheese steeped in fresh wine, tripe hash, liver in pastry boats, oysters and hot buttered snails, pastry thrushes with raisin and nut stuffing, quinces with thorns stuck in them to resemble sea urchins, because I’m handsome.

  Some people like sex, most men don’t. What if I’m blowing him, I look up as he brings down a knife—I either die or don’t die. I’m alone at night in bed, someone’s moving silently up the stairs—this was to be a sexual rendezvous but instead he intends to wrap a wire around my neck. I don’t die but my erection’s gone. I must begin again: what if he puts his hand under my tunic, his finger up my ass and I squirm down on it, why not? My girl’s laughing—dildos shaped like birds and fish. He’s moaning Nostra Lesbia, Lesbia ilia, ilia Lesbia—what is this, Latin? This guy’s obviously educated.

  Orioles must be aphrodisiac or maybe it’s the situation because all we want to do is fuck, we can’t keep our clothes on, we go to it, showing off for him. I love how our eyes go blank and then we think with our bodies. She licks it like a cat with her rough tongue, or like licking ketchup off your forefinger—one two, that’s all. Then men come and lift me and hold my legs and body while he fucks me and I’m blowing somebody, it’s fantastic, all I ever want to do is this.

  Brian and I were working ourselves around to coming; we enjoyed the sense of absolute well-being and safety that precedes orgasm. By now we were on our knees kissing urgently and masturbating ourselves. Our cocks felt a little ragged and wanted the master’s touch. Masturbation can feel better, although I favor a penetration for emotional meaning. Still, that was hardly necessary since we filled up the house to overflowing, and besides, we weren’t planning to have a baby.

  Orgasms come in all shapes and sizes, sometimes mechanical as a jack-in-the-box—an obsessive little tune, tension, pop goes the weasel—other times they brim with meaning. And other times, like now, they are the complimentary close that signals the end of a lengthy exchange. I recall a memorable climax, a terrific taste of existence in the summer of ’73. I was with Ed; we weren’t doing anything special but the orgasm started clearly with the fluttering of my prostate, usually a distant gland, sending icy waves to my extremities. Then a hot rush carried my torso up into an arc and just before I came a ball bearing of energy ping-ponged up and down my spine.

  Brian and I curled into each other. Our semen smelled faintly of chlorine. Sunlight glittered off or was accepted by the domestic surfaces. On our way to falling asleep we exchanged dreams:

  Bob: I dreamt that an alligator lives in my kitchen wall; it cries brokenheartedly on the weekends. A cannibal rabbit with sharp teeth lives there too. A pathetic shabby man who looks like Genet keeps beckoning to me, appearing at a distance everywhere, even on the Greyhound bus I take to escape him, standing up the aisle and beckoning. These characters fill me with dread. I know they can’t hurt me in themselves—they are intensely defeated, already claimed by death to such an extent that I writhe backward rather than associate with them.

  Brian: I dreamt this while I was nuts. A group of nuns in black and white floated on the surface of a foreign planet. They were only heads, like that creature in the space movie. In their hands they carried candles that vibrated colors and gold. Everything on the nuns’ side was grey and dead, but where the candles were, the light created moving patterns of color and electricity.

  Bob: One day Denise, following a recipe of mine, made baked apples in wine. But something went awry and they turned out hard and sour. That night I dreamt there was a new kind of elephant called an Applederm, and its babies were called Apples.

  Brian: I was at a party with my father. Our hosts—a family—were noticeably absent, which made me angrier and angrier. I followed my father into the dining room to placate myself with some food and as I looked up I realized it was my parents’ apartment. There was laughter from the other room and someone said, “All our hearts are the same here.”

  Bob: I dreamt this around puberty. I was making love with my little sister on her bed but the springs squeaked and I was anxious because my family in the next room might hear us. So we became bumblebees and hovered above the bed, buzzing and buzzing, and when we touched stingers I came. (I never told anyone my bumblebee dream, had forgotten it for years. I felt that now Brian could know me in one piece—what wasn’t in the dream he could extrapolate.)

  Brian: I stood in a room that was all black and white and because the dream was in color it was beautifully vivid. Black and white tiled floor, white walls, black and white solid drapes. As I looked around the room I saw a black bed from classical Greece, white sheets and in the bed a boy, sun-tanned with platinum blond hair. The contrast between him and the black and white setting filled me with joy; I moved closer passing through veils of black and white (remember duality?) and as I kissed him I awoke with the overwhelming erection that only dreams can provide.

  Brian and I sometimes exchange letters. In the latest, Brian told me he is moving in with a lover. I felt a pang that I had no right to turn into any claim—the pain augmented by the fact that Sterling moved out of my life without leaving a forwarding address. I had been curious about the story Brian painted from his mother’s childhood.

  He answered:

  “The image was based on one of my mother’s frequent outings with my grandmother, my great aunt Kate and her uncle Ollie. Kate’s husband, Hugo, died young and on weekends my grandmother and Kate would pack a picnic and make a day of visiting Hugo. I’m not sure why this is so peculiar to me. Maybe because that’s my mother’s impression of it. More likely it’s that Be-Be (our name for my grandmother) and Katie were so unaware of the irony of taking children to play in a cemetery. I made my mother the embracer and my uncle the observer. Later, Katie was institutionalized along with both her daughters, who somehow were not in on these trips. I met Katie when I was six and she would definitely win my most terrifying-person-I-ever-met award. She had straight black hair cut severely across with straight long bangs. She sat hostilely on my grandmother’s sofa, barely acknowledging our family’s presence. She also scared the shit out of my father. She eventually died in a hospital
singing Irish lullabies to herself.

  “My grandmother held her own in the strange department. In her sixties she had to have one of her eyes—including the lid—removed. Instead of wearing a patch, Be-Be opted for glasses with a large plastic artificial eye attached to one of the lenses. It had a bizarre effect, particularly when she napped. What can I say about riding the subway with her—that people stared? that I got angry? It made me dislike people and love her. She would call and invite me to lunch. ‘We’ll go out!’ she’d say expansively, as if The Acorn on Oak were the world. I gave her a feather boa one Christmas and we were thick as thieves after that. She loved to dance, drink. She would come out of the bathroom with hair she had just bleached platinum, make a ’20s pout in the mirror, say, ‘Your mother and I are both blonds,’ and giggle. She was great.

  “When Be-Be died, she presented a unique problem to the undertaker. My mother insisted that the coffin be open in the Irish tradition. The undertakers were perplexed—should they put Be-Be’s glasses on her and create the disconcerting effect of a corpse with one eye open? In the end that’s exactly what they did, and dressed in her favorite red beaded gown, Be-Be said goodbye.

  “Moody in her earlier years, Be-Be became senile later. I’d go to her apartment and cook dinner. I loved her very much. In the hospital she suddenly became lucid and rose to the occasion of her death. She said, ‘You always learn something. Now I’m learning about tenses. How long is this going to take?’ Then she removed her rings, one by one, and placed them on the nightstand for my mother.”

  In the Cemetery Where

  Al Jolson Is Buried

  by Amy Hempel

  “Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting,” she said. “Make it useless stuff or skip it.”

  I began. I told her insects fly through rain, missing every drop, never getting wet. I told her no one in America owned a tape recorder before Bing Crosby did. I told her the shape of the moon is like a banana—you see it looking full, you’re seeing it end-on.

  The camera made me self-conscious and I stopped. It was trained on us from a ceiling mount—the kind of camera banks use to photograph robbers. It played us to the nurses down the hall in Intensive Care.

  “Go on, girl,” she said. “You get used to it.”

  I had my audience. I went on. Did she know that Tammy Wynette had changed her tune? Really. That now she sings “Stand by Your Friends”? That Paul Anka did it too, I said. Does “You’re Having Our Baby.” That he got sick of all that feminist bitching.

  “What else?” she said. “Have you got something else?”

  Oh, yes.

  For her I would always have something else.

  “Did you know that when they taught the first chimp to talk, it lied? That when they asked her who did it on the desk, she signed back the name of the janitor. And that when they pressed her, she said she was sorry, that it was really the project director. But she was a mother, so I guess she had her reasons.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” she said. “A parable.”

  “There’s more about the chimp,” I said. “But it will break your heart.”

  “No, thanks,” she says, and scratches at her mask.

  We look like good-guy outlaws. Good or bad, I am not used to the mask yet. I keep touching the warm spot where my breath, thank God, comes out. She is used to hers. She only ties the strings on top. The other ones—a pro by now—she lets hang loose.

  We call this place the Marcus Welby Hospital. It’s the white one with the palm trees under the opening credits of all those shows. A Hollywood hospital, though in fact it is several miles west. Off camera, there is a beach across the street.

  She introduces me to a nurse as the Best Friend. The impersonal article is more intimate. It tells me that they are intimate, the nurse and my friend.

  “I was telling her we used to drink Canada Dry ginger ale and pretend we were in Canada.”

  “That’s how dumb we were,” I say.

  “You could be sisters,” the nurse says.

  So how come, I’ll bet they are wondering, it took me so long to get to such a glamorous place? But do they ask?

  They do not ask.

  Two months, and how long is the drive?

  The best I can explain it is this—I have a friend who worked one summer in a mortuary. He used to tell me stories. The one that really got to me was not the grisliest, but it’s the one that did. A man wrecked his car on 101 going south. He did not lose consciousness. But his arm was taken down to the wet bone—and when he looked at it—it scared him to death.

  I mean, he died.

  So I hadn’t dared to look any closer. But now I’m doing it—and hoping that I will live through it.

  She shakes out a summer-weight blanket, showing a leg you did not want to see. Except for that, you look at her and understand the law that requires two people to be with the body at all times.

  “I thought of something,” she says. “I thought of it last night. I think there is a real and present need here. You know,” she says, “like for someone to do it for you when you can’t do it yourself. You call them up whenever you want—like when push comes to shove.”

  She grabs the bedside phone and loops the cord around her neck.

  “Hey,” she says, “the end o’ the line.”

  She keeps on, giddy with something. But I don’t know with what.

  “I can’t remember,” she says. “What does Kübler-Ross say comes after Denial?”

  It seems to me Anger must be next. Then Bargaining, Depression, and so on and so forth. But I keep my guesses to myself.

  “The only thing is,” she says, “is where’s Resurrection? God knows, I want to do it by the book. But she left out Resurrection.”

  She laughs, and I cling to the sound the way someone dangling above a ravine holds fast to the thrown rope.

  “Tell me,” she says, “about that chimp with the talking hands. What do they do when the thing ends and the chimp says, ‘I don’t want to go back to the zoo’?”

  When I don’t say anything, she says, “Okay—then tell me another animal story. I like animal stories. But not a sick one—I don’t want to know about all the seeing-eye dogs going blind.”

  No, I would not tell her a sick one.

  “How about the hearing-ear dogs?” I say. “They’re not going deaf, but they are getting very judgmental. For instance, there’s this golden retriever in New Jersey, he wakes up the deaf mother and drags her into the daughter’s room because the kid has got a flashlight and is reading under the covers.”

  “Oh, you’re killing me,” she says. “Yes, you’re definitely killing me.”

  “They say the smart dog obeys, but the smarter dog knows when to disobey.”

  “Yes,” she says, “the smarter anything knows when to disobey. Now, for example.”

  She is flirting with the Good Doctor, who has just appeared. Unlike the Bad Doctor, who checks the IV drip before saying good morning, the Good Doctor says things like “God didn’t give epileptics a fair shake.” The Good Doctor awards himself points for the cripples he could have hit in the parking lot. Because the Good Doctor is a little in love with her, he says maybe a year. He pulls a chair up to her bed and suggests I might like to spend an hour on the beach.

  “Bring me something back,” she says. “Anything from the beach. Or the gift shop. Taste is no object.”

  He draws the curtain around her bed.

  “Wait!” she cries.

  I look in at her.

  “Anything,” she says, “except a magazine subscription.”

  The doctor turns away.

  I watch her mouth laugh.

  What seems dangerous often is not—black snakes, for example, or clear-air turbulence. While things that just lie there, like this beach, are loaded with jeopardy. A yellow dust rising from the ground, the hea
t that ripens melons overnight—this is earthquake weather. You can sit here braiding the fringe on your towel and the sand will all of a sudden suck down like an hourglass. The air roars. In the cheap apartments on-shore, bathtubs fill themselves and gardens roll up and over like green waves. If nothing happens, the dust will drift and the heat deepen till fear turns to desire. Nerves like that are only bought off by catastrophe.

  “It never happens when you’re thinking about it,” she once observed. “Earthquake, earthquake, earthquake,” she said.

  “Earthquake, earthquake, earthquake,” I said.

  Like the aviaphobe who keeps the plane aloft with prayer, we kept it up until an aftershock cracked the ceiling.

  That was after the big one in ’72. We were in college; our dormitory was five miles from the epicenter. When the ride was over and my jabbering pulse began to slow, she served five parts champagne to one part orange juice, and joked about living in Ocean View, Kansas. I offered to drive her to Hawaii on the new world psychics predicted would surface the next time, or the next.

  I could not say that now—next.

  Whose next? she could ask.

  Was I the only one who noticed that the experts had stopped saying if and now spoke of when? Of course not; the fearful ran to thousands. We watched the traffic of Japanese beetles for deviation. Deviation might mean more natural violence.

  I wanted her to be afraid with me. But she said, “I don’t know. I’m just not.”