by Linda Rogers
What is a lost credit card compared to a stunning haiku, the “Maison d’or” duet from The Pearl Fishers played on his guitar, a perfect moon cake filled with lotus seed paste or a beautiful orgasm, lotus petals opening on a starlit lake, when the moon is full?
She considers fully submerging the antique eggbeater, a major no-no. Recently, after a tiff, she emptied the dustpan in his omelette. Oops.
They call it rude hour, after her info-crush, the silver-haired CNN anchor, reads the evening news, after bathing together in tepid water because he hates to be hot, after eating cake, their hunger exacerbated by dissonance, after he finds her new message folded in his perfect triangle of moon: REPENT.
Really? For what he might ask, but doesn’t, except in his own mind-list of grievances for guarding what is his, what is hers by virtue of being his, for protecting her from her impulses, her carelessness, her broad strokes, from stolen credit cards and disfigured eggs, from rats in the year of the rat (many he has personally disposed of, catching them in traps in her deliberately overgrown garden of rampant ivy and clematis, bagging then taking them to a garbage can in the park so she won’t have to see them when she disposes of their household waste), and from the squirrel who steals her gold-wrapped ginger candies and buries them in the garden, “Don’t leave the doors and windows open!” Who is the one to apologise? Who actually requires a festival to justify her womanhood, her own personal lady-moon?
She gets in bed first, watches through the bathroom portal while he performs oral hygiene, the floss, the toothpick, the slow and thorough brushing; watches him clean his glasses, wind the clock, set the clock; watches him carefully fold his clothes, fit shoehorns in his ugly-ass Bruno Maglis, torn from the body of a deceased tycoon and sold to him for a song at Value Village; watches him turn out the lights, wishes she too could pass wind at will, and wonders if that extra piece of moon cake is slowly inflating his belly, if it will lead to the cardiac event she fears more than anything. She wants to put her finger down his throat.
Someone turns the moonlight on.
He watches her watching him. She says she is invisible, but she isn’t. He tells her, but she doesn’t believe him, that he embraces her pillow when she gets up first, that he sniffs her clothes hanging in the closet, her shoes, her handbags, that he actually likes her decomposing skin, “Patina!”
She was programmed to imbibe negativity in the time when men hated intelligent women, when men had opinions and opinionated women were bitches. Is it not still that time? She has after all noticed ruthless exercise, inflated lips and brows, frozen faces. Viral insecurity.
“Don’t speak!” Who knew that Garbo, reportedly an androgyne, was speaking to herself, that Garbo was afraid of bells because she was stung by bees sleeping in a bell she’d inadvertently rung.
Just the other night, because she had meant to walk but gave in to her fear of the dark, she got on a late bus after a poetry reading and told him when she arrived home that a man had changed seats three times to be near her. “I would be remiss,” the man said when she pressed the buzzer for her stop, “if I didn’t tell you I found you incredibly attractive.” If she’d remembered her glasses, she could have told him what the man looked like. There’s no point in fabricating. He knows all the indicators. She flutters her lids when she’s lying. She over-describes and takes gulps of air.
“I hid behind a tree in case he followed, wondering if you would come out to look for me.”
“You are the psychic, the intuitive one. I thought you’d visualised someone to drive you home.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
In fact, she saw the pride in his eyes. Mine, he thought, an old girl someone desired. She liked that, but as happens all too often, fell asleep before they could capitalize on the moment, another ritual. She is turned on by his music, by women rattling their bracelets in praise, leaving their chairs damp.
“Don’t hurt our love,” he says for the thousandth time, since the first time. They have many rituals: the coffee ritual, the buffing their wedding rings ritual, the gathering eggs ritual, the speaking crow on the roof ritual, the share the chocolate ritual and the rude hour ritual, where the unspeakable is spoken. Now it is rude hour….
…and, this is how they make up, lying in bed, naked as jays, holding hands, reciting their unholy canticles, four-letter words for body emissions, trumpet involuntary. “Fart,” he says, “Puss,” she says.” Come, “he says, “Tear,” she says, “Pooh,” he says, “Milk,” she says, her trump card. She is a mother. Nothing trumps milk.
“Song,” he says, already checked by her queen. “Poem,” she replies, there are no songs without words, not really, and starts purring, no snoring—her prerogative. He leans over and plants one on the back of her neck, because she reacts like a cat when he nibbles her there.
“Kiss checks word,” a dead poet whispers in her sleep. She doesn’t give the poem tiptoeing through her body another thought.
SHADOW DANCING
I don’t know any of these people. What to bring? Is beer too plebeian, wine too chic? Maybe they drink kava? Not me, I had an allergic reaction, sick for days after I drank the green muck at an old hippy birthday at a Sonoma vineyard, the one where my husband and Dan Hicks, dead now, pouted in the shade and blew their last chance to play together, old buddies, while the hosts danced to an alien salsa band, because the birthday boy had at last acceded to his wife’s beautiful longing to dance.
We have brought brownies, but not the Alice B. Toklas kind, another sick inducer. I went into a deep well for three days when someone surprised me with psychedelic icing at a Halloween party a few years ago. My brownies are from an online recipe, only I was missing an ingredient, cocoa, so I mixed chocolate chips with molasses and some maple syrup for the hell of it. My husband says they will not pass with old stoners.
The guests are wandering around dancing to silence, maybe to the angel band, I guess. I am so unhip. I introduce myself. No one else does it. These ghosts, parents of Saffron, Sage, Stinging Nettle et al., are a cornucopia of edible plants from the safe side of Paradise—no Cains or Abels, and all appear to answer to plain names like Jane, Bob, Jack and Susan. It’s Bob’s birthday, and they have gathered from the parameters of affluence, discreetly parking their Mercedes down the street as if they might have ridden in on donkeys or walked the yellow brick road to Bob’s house, resplendent in their iconoclast uniforms, sandals and love beads, bearing the geriatric hippy versions of frankincense and myrrh, bundles of hash and virtuous bread.
There is an undercurrent. Bob’s house, a large Arts and Crafts cottage in Oak Bay, is apparently contentious. She left. He stayed. The second Bob Wife hunkers down in the kitchen making quinoa salads. She is the thin one, wearing, because this is a sixties party, lace hipsters that show off her suntanned legs and a short leather top with a fringe covering a paucity of mammalian infrastructure. I help put out the food. She says, when asked, that she is childless, a free spirit. She doesn’t appear to have cooked a lot. Her fringe keeps getting in the food. Second Bob Wife keeps flicking it away. The flicks could be stardust in the dying light, wasted particles of the universe.
Meanwhile First Wife, a much larger woman, perhaps unhappy in her new relationship and secretly gorging on her allegedly legendary deep-fried ginger tofu, is pissing on everything that was theirs, now all his or New Theirs. “We bought this in the Kadiköy antique market.” She is showing off the light fixture in the dining room, a Byzantine variation on Mackintosh with descending amber bulbs, and she actually lifts her cobalt silver-blue Afghan skirt, an ethnic dress that cost a small fortune at Sunny Goodge Street (Rumour has it there were third world people working the sewing machines and knitting over the shop) to polish the brass switch plate where the lamp turns on.
“Oooo,” we say. “How could you leave that behind?”
How indeed? There are many familiar objects. The guests point this way and that. “Remember,” they say, and New Wife actually cuts her finge
r. Her blood mixes in with the before-mentioned flicks because she can’t miss a beat. If she does, nothing will get done, and besides it looks as if she might implode. No one else is helping. Everyone else is busy admiring the old stuff, telling the war stories attached to acquiring the old stuff, the memories she may or may not be a part of.
Or perhaps they were best friends, and they traded. Bob and Carol, Ted and Alice. That happened a lot after someone started passing around a copy of Open Marriage.
My only experience with that was waking up in the middle of the night to find Someone’s Wife in our tent where Someone had dumped her during a camping trip. Apparently, he had suggested I join him, but I missed it because I am a deep sleeper, then as now. Lucky me.
Somehow I don’t think my extemporaneous fantasy is working. There isn’t that old-friend familiarity between the two women, the affection that suggests former threesomes, or foursomes, keys on the coffee table, shared joints, pots of tea and placenta helper, that sort of thing.
These are not my people, the marriage is forever, study hard, say no to drugs kind of people. They are party people on the cusp of, oboy, prune mixed with sedatives, the new party in your mouth. I smugly recall the dementia people I know are all former drug users, mostly mother’s little helpers, the amphetamines that kept our mothers skinny and busy in the fifties. Now it is our turn, love-in ingestibles and injectibles having the last word.
When I drift from the kitchen to the sunroom, I realise my husband has opted not to socialise. He has two options at ill-fitting parties. One is to hang around the food and eat his face off, which I worry will lead to a coronary event, and the other is to pick like a deranged Latvian. Tonight it is option two, and I opt to listen so I don’t have to listen. Conversation between hard-of-hearing strangers is exhausting, and I will save that chore for the almost inevitable out-to-pasture warehousing, the option I am trying desperately to avoid.
Luke is singing “The Snake,” redeeming the song written by civil rights activist Oscar Brown and twisted by the Mango Surprise (not so much) at campaign rallies, transforming refugees from Amerika’s Imperial Wars into brown Satans.
Way to go, human beings. We are all force-dancing with the devil now. Dignified death and what to be next have become major obsessions. I am thinking of Cocaine with Chinese poison and tree burial.
I like the idea of becoming a tree, as opposed to a diamond ring (Is it vulgar? Who would wear me?) but am not sure what kind of tree I want to be. Would I be evergreen or deciduous? Should I bear fruit, or nuts? My children would agree with the nut option. I can just hear them. “That’s appropriate,” they would say in unison, an opinion substantiated by going through my stuff, a lifetime of oddities. Maybe I will be a pine. I like the smell, nothing like the pine forest on the road from Izmir to Cesme.
The party guests are not focused on death. No one mentions the absent friends. No one mentions the fame and fortune that eluded them, just the starlit moments when they actually met someone famous or handled his old guitar in a consignment shop. Names are dropping like turds at the dog park.
“This was Joan’s. Mimi let me play it.” Because I have been around, I can translate. Joan Baez, guilty about her fortune, twinned every purchase and gave one to her friends, who sometimes consigned them. We’ve seen lots of dresses we recognize in thrift shops. My husband is expert at culling ordinary shmatte from haute couture.
I arrange myself by the fireplace, shirts fanned out, ankles crossed, expression unassailable, neither bored nor socially anxious, enduring the overly familiar music in a chair upholstered in velvet. These people live in the suburbs of fame and fortune. It’s just that I have never heard of them.
“That’s a beautiful dress,” he hands me his card while I look for traces of hair under the red cowboy kerchief tied, Hell’s Angel style, around his pate. The grey braids could be fake.
“Thanks. It was designed by Gareth Helter in the sixties.” I say this as if he is supposed to know Gareth Helter. I looked him up after finding the dress in a new-to-you.
“Oh yeah. What happened to him?”
“He died of AIDS in the eighties.”
“Didn’t everyone?” He has that dreamy stupid look of a guy who can’t go to a party without getting stoned first.
“No not all.” I am feeling bitchy and alive. “Some of us have been lucky, if you call witnessing the downfall of the American Empire a good view.”
This is way too many words for him. His “country” kerchief could be a red flag. He adjusts his headscarf, licks his lips and reaches in the inside pocket of his Afghan vest lined with sheepskin, which must be hot.
“Can I give you my card?”
This is cute. Does he want me to buy his product, probably a self-published album, or should I be calling him for a noon assignation, white wine and bed salad, culminating in the inevitable erectile failure and the usual excuses, “I’m upset by your stretch marks,” “You weren’t ready for me” and the best one of all, “Your hearing aids are a real turnoff?”
“I’ll give it to my husband. He’s younger than I am, and he reads small print better,” I say, tucking it in my banca abuela, the granny bank named by my granddaughter when I tucked the tourist pesos, cucs, between my, trust me, still perky breasts.
At the word, the warning, he turns tail. I know doctors who keep photos of dead wives and grown children front and centre on their desks to discourage patients who think because he or she has had their hands on them that must be a bond. “Husband” works too. Mine gets up and leans into me. “Do you know who that is?”
“No, and I don’t want to.” I return to my resting bitch face.
I know the other women are watching, but they do not react. I still call it the Mean Girl expression. Maybe I am missing something in their body language, a blink, or muscle spasm. Why not me, some might be thinking, or why is he still trying, or I can’t believe he’s still using the cards.
We will not be bonding, the “me” I brought to the party and these people. I am not of them, even though I did skinny-dip with the hippy who married the Prime Minister on the night of the moon-landing. I did not share specular views when that was fashionable, when knowing your vagina and your girlfriends’ vaginas was essential to modernity, or clay strained relics from playschool, a recent meme.
I am actually invisible to all but my husband and bandana man, Willie’s twin, who reeks of desperation. I get it. Loneliness is what happens, even if, especially if, there were times when life was defined by a crowd function beyond imagining, surging audiences overtaking stages like waves and bands of groupies waiting backstage. It takes a while to figure out that fans are not friends. These are things I have not had to resolve because I am an observer. These things are obvious when you are watching.
I was tempted to clap when he spun away from me with a small theatrical shrug. He kept his back straight and avoided eye contact, engaging the next woman, who appeared to be enthralled. It is performance. I have seen if before, men who try and try as if trying were their masculine imperative, and maybe it is. Roosters affect indifference when they troll the barnyard delivering little squirts here and there, as do the hens that are simply about the business of laying eggs with little haemorrhages in the yolks, proof of life.
That’s it. These guys are all roosters. They never give up, and we, the girls in the room, are still girls. I am not sure I want this to be an end-of-life revelation, the result of years of feminist activism.
I am now remembering a time before I met my husband, when I was insulted, no deeply hurt, by an interim lover who told me my inability to have more children meant I was no longer a woman. Never mind that I had delivered dead babies in the middle of the night, into a dark and terrible loneliness. Never mind that my surviving children struggled to live, that I struggled with them and the failure of my husband to share it with me meant the end of a family I intended to honour. Did that make me less a woman?
I stood up in the patio bar on St. Denis wh
ere all his friends were celebrating the beginning of le weekend and tore my dress from the neck to the waist, revealing my breasts. I walked out, and he followed, frantically trying to cover me with his Armani jacket. “You are mad,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “as in angry,” not crazy. I knew what I was doing.
I am mad now, not crazy but angry that a man testing his power would try to pick me up, especially in front of my husband, that he would think his row of Junos gave him the right to try. Mad that he fails to see I am more than just a dress, that I too have back-story and a credible vocation. Mad that other women are watching. Mad that he would try again, and mad that we have all endured the systemic misogyny of the recent American election, where the only qualified candidate was too old to fuck.
My husband is back in his chair singing “Down Home Girl,” possibly because he sees me smouldering, and he knows I love the song. I know what to do. I fix my eyes on bandana man and slowly take over the middle of the room. The dancers back off. It is all quiet except for my husband’s voice.
Every time you monkey child
Takes my breath away.
Every time you move like that
Girl I got to get down and pray.
First I take off my shoes and then my earrings and bracelets. Then comes the dress, which I pull over my head and swing like a matador’s cape. Now I will step out of my underpants. I give them a moment to take that in and then do it. I am as naked as the day I entered the world backwards, bum first and left-handed, sinestra, as brave as Nicole Kidman in The Killing of the Sacred Deer, no braver, because she’s as thin as a whip. My blog nom de plum is Sinestra Libtard. You may have seen it. I take no prisoners.
I raise my arms and bounce in place. My breasts rise and fall. I suck the air out of the room, and my husband stops singing.
I let it sink in, and then I swoop to pick up my things. It is time to leave. I signal to my husband, put away your instrument. Now. My well-rehearsed non-negotiable look. Get. Me. Out. Of. Here. I dress, or re-dress, and we collect the untouched uncool brownie plate and our various appointments: glasses, purse, mandolin and knitting bag, and head for the door.