by James Morrow
I glanced at my Beatoff Magazine calendar—and a good thing, or I might have forgotten about meeting my wife for lunch. “Helen,” said the July 9th square, “1 P.M., No Great Shakes.” No Great Shakes on Twenty-ninth Street had marvelous submarine sandwiches and terrific Waldorf salads. Its shakes were not so great.
Miss July—Wendy Warren, according to the accompanying profile—leered at me from the glossy paper. “Being an intellectual,” ran her capsule biography, “Wendy proved most articulate on the subject of posing for us. ‘It’s at once tawdry and exhilarating, humiliating and energizing,’ she said. ‘If not for the quick five thousand, I never would’ve considered it.’ When we learned how smart she was—that Interborough Chess Championship and everything—we almost disqualified her. However, we knew that many of you would enjoy masturbating to…”
Good old Wendy. My hypothetical id was ticking. And suddenly I realized there’d be a minor but irrefutable thrill in simply looking at Martina Coventry’s handwriting, as if its twists and turns were the lines of her Rubensian flesh. I took a long sip of Donaldson’s Drinkable and, pulling Martina’s doggerel from my pocket, flattened the crumpled sheet on the desk.
The verses were as terrible as ever, but the signature indeed held a certain eroticism. I even got a mild charge from the contours of the subsequent information. “7 Lackluster Lane, Descartes Borough,” she’d written. “Phone 610-400.”
Something caught my eye, a web of thin shallow grooves in the paper, occupying the space between the Valentine message and the birthday greeting, and I realized that the object in my possession had backstopped one of Martina’s earlier creative convulsions. Curious, I seized the nearest pencil and began rubbing graphite across the page, causing the older verses to materialize like a photographic image in a tray of developer. Within seconds the entire composition lay before me, and my nervous system vibrated with intermingled disbelief, horror, and fascination.
Lies.
Gruesome and poetic lies.
In Martina Coventry’s own hand.
I hide my wings inside my soul,
Their feathers soft and dry,
And when the world’s not looking,
I take them out and fly.
Sweat erupted in my palms and along my brow. Wings. Martina didn’t have wings. No one did. Who did she think she was, the Nike of Samothrace? One might as well assert the reality of Santa Claus or Lewis Carroll’s Alice. As for the soul, that soggy construct…
Perhaps my eyes were deceiving me. I resolved to read the poem aloud—hearing is believing; to sense these astonishing words resounding in my head would be to know they in fact existed. “I hide my wings,” I said in a hoarse whisper, but I couldn’t go on. An primordial terror surged up, bringing a migraine so severe I almost fainted.
My critical instincts took hold. I seized Martina’s poem, dashed out of the museum and ran across the courtyard to the main incinerator. Skull throbbing, I thrust the page toward the same seething pit where the day before I had deconstructed a dozen books on reincarnation and the last two hundred issues of The Journal of Psychic Healing.
I stopped.
Was I in fact ready to cast Martina Coventry out of my life? Was I truly willing to consign her identity to the flames? No. I wasn’t. I fixed on her address, massaging it into my memory.
How did she tell lies without going mad?
How?
Phone 610-400. No problem. For his sixth birthday we’d given Toby a ten-speed bike, but four months went by before I put it together, and he hardly ever rode it, so the whole experience was rather null, a zero—two, in fact. 6…1…0…4…0…0.
My fingers parted, and the poems floated toward their fate, joining the Homer epics, the Racine plays, the Dickens novels, and the mushy, gushy, pseudoscientific rantings of The Journal of Psychic Healing.
“It’s absolutely incredible,” I told Helen as we sat in No Great Shakes burrowing into the day’s special: MURDERED COW SANDWICH, WILTED HEARTS OF LETTUCE, HIGH-CHOLESTEROL FRIES—A QUITE REASONABLE $5.99. “Four hours ago I was having breakfast with a dissembler. I could’ve reached out and touched her.”
“But you didn’t,” said Helen in a tone more apprehensive than certain. She slid her sunglasses upward into her frothy, graying hair, the better to scrutinize my face.
“I didn’t.”
“She’s definitely one of them?”
“I’m positive. More or less.”
My wife looked straight at me, a shred of lettuce drooping over her lips like a green tongue. “Let’s not get carried away,” she said.
Let’s not get carried away. That was Helen’s motto; it belonged on her tombstone. She was a woman who’d devoted her life to not getting carried away—in her career, in our bed, anywhere. It was her job, I believe, that made her so sedate. As a stringer for the celebrated supermarket tabloid, Sweet Reason, Helen moved among the skeptics and logicians of the world, collecting scoops: CONTROLLED STUDY NEGATES NEW ARTHRITIS CURE, SLAIN BIGFOOT REVEALED AS SCHIZOPHRENIC IN SUIT, TOP PSYCHICS’ PREDICTIONS FALL FLAT. Ten years of writing such stories, and you acquire a bit of a chill.
I said, “You have a better interpretation, ostensible darling?”
“Maybe she found the paper on the street, supposed sweetheart,” Helen replied. A beautiful woman, I’d always thought: large pleading eyes, soft round cheeks you wanted to rub against your hands like balm. “Maybe somebody else composed the poem.”
“It was in Martina’s handwriting.”
Helen bit into her murdered cow. “Let me guess. She gave you her name and address, right?”
“Yes. She wrote them on the page.”
“Did she say she wanted to have sex with you?”
“Not in so many words.”
“Did you say you wanted to have sex with her?”
“Yes.”
“You think you will?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so, I hope not—you know how it is.” I licked the grease from a French fry. “I’d hate to hurt you,” I added.
Helen’s eyes became as dark and narrow as slots in a gun turret. “I probably feel as conflicted as you. Part of me wants you to turn this Martina over to the Brutality Squad, the better to get her out of our lives forever. The other part, the woman who feels a certain undeniable affection for you, knows that would be a stupid thing to do, because if the lady senses the police are on her trail, well, she might also sense how they got there, right? These dissemblers, I’ve heard, are no nonliteral pussycats. They’ve got assassins in their ranks.”
“Assassins,” I concurred. “Assassins, terrorists, lunatics. You want me to burn the paper?”
“Burn it, critic.”
“I did.”
My wife smiled. In Veritas, one never asked, Really? Are you kidding? Do you mean that? She finished her cow and said, “You’re a somewhat better man than I thought.”
We filled the rest of the hour with the usual marital battles—such ironically allied words, marital, martial. Helen and I loved to fight. My erections were becoming increasingly less substantive, she asserted, truthfully. The noises she made when chewing her food were disgusting, I reported, honestly. She told me she had no intention of procuring the obligatory gift for my niece’s brainburn party on Saturday—Connie wasn’t her niece. I didn’t want her to get the gift, I retorted, because she’d buy something cheap, obvious, and otherwise emblematic of the contempt in which she held my sister. And so we continued, straight through coffee and dessert, nibbling at each other like mice, picking each other off like snipers. Such fun, such pathological fun.
Helen reached into her handbag and pulled out a crisp sheet of computer paper speckled with dot-matrix characters. “This came this morning,” she explained. “A rabbit bit Toby,” she announced evenly.
“A what? Rabbit? What are you talking about?”
“He’s probably forgotten the whole thing by now.”
“It bit him?”
Ralph Kitto
Executive Director
Camp Ditch-the-Kids
Box 145
Kant Borough
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Sperry:
As you may know, your son makes it his annoying mission to release all the animals caught in our rat trap. Yesterday, in performing one such act of ambiguous compassion, he was attacked by a rare species called Hob’s hare. We dressed his wound immediately and, checking his medical records, confirmed that his tetanus immunizations are up to date.
As a safety precaution, we retained the rabbit and placed it under quarantine. I am moderately sorry to report that today the animal died. We forthwith froze the corpse then shipped it to the Kraft Epidemiological Institute. The Kraft doctors will contact you if there’s anything to worry about, though I suspect you’ve started worrying already.
Yours up to a point,
Ralph Kitto
“Why didn’t you show me this right away?”
Helen shrugged. “It’s not a big deal.”
Smooth, nervy Helen. There were times when I wondered whether she liked Toby. “Aren’t you bothered that the rabbit died?”
“Maybe it was old.”
My teeth came together in a tight, dense grid. The thought of Toby’s pain troubled me. Not his physical pain—it might have even done him some good, toughening him up for his brainburn. What distressed me was the sense of betrayal he must have felt; my son had always negotiated with the world in good faith, and now the world had bitten him. “There’s something I should tell you,” I admitted to my wife. “Before burning Martina’s doggerel, I memorized her address and phone number.”
Helen appeared to be experiencing a bad odor. “How readily you exhibit the same disgusting qualities one associates with anuses. Honestly, Jack, sometimes I wonder why we got married.”
“Sometimes I wonder the same thing. I wish that rabbit hadn’t died.”
“Forget the rabbit. We’re talking about why I married you.”
“You married me,” I said, telling the truth, “because you thought I was your last chance.”
Two
Saturday: pigs have wings, dogs can talk, money grows on trees—like some mindless and insistent song the litany wove through me, rolling amid the folds of my cerebrum as it always did when one of my nieces was scheduled to get burned. Stones are alive, rats chase cats—ten lies all told, a decalogue of deceit, resting at our city’s core like a dragon sleeping beside a subterranean treasure. Salt is sweet, the Pope is Jewish—and suddenly the child has done it, suddenly she’s thrown off the corrupt mantle of youth and put on the innocence of adulthood. Suddenly she’s a woman.
I awoke aggressively that morning, tearing the blankets away as if nothing else stood between myself and total alertness. Across the room, my wife slept peacefully, indifferent to the world’s sad truths, its dead rabbits. Ours was a two-bed marriage. The symbolism was not lost on me. Often we made love on the floor—in the narrow, neutral territory between our mattresses, our conjugal Geneva.
Yawning, I charged into the shower stall, where warm water poured forth the instant the sensors detected me. The TV receiver winked on—the Enduring Another Day program. Grimacing under the studio lights, our Assistant Secretary of Imperialism discussed the city’s growing involvement in the Hegelian Civil War. “So far, over four thousand Veritasian combat troops have died,” the interviewer noted as I lathered up with Bourgeois Soap. “A senseless loss,” the secretary replied cheerfully. “Our policy is impossible to justify on rational grounds, which is why we’ve started invoking national security and other shibboleths.”
I left the shower and padded bare-assed into the bedroom. Clothes per se were deceitful, of course, but nudity carried its own measure of compromise, a continual tacit message of provocation and come-hither. I dressed. Nothing disingenuous: underwear, a collarless shirt, a gray Age-of-Lies suit with the lapels cut off. Our apartment was similarly spare, peeled to a core of rectitude. Many of our friends had curtains, wall hangings, and rugs, but not Helen and I. We were patriotic.
The odor of stale urine hit me as I approached the elevator. How unfortunate that some people translated the ban on sexually segregated restrooms—PRIVACY IS A LIE, the huge flashing billboard on Voltaire Avenue reminded us—into a general fear of toilets. Hadn’t they heard of public health? Public health was guileless.
I descended, crossed the lobby, encapsulated myself in the revolving door, and exited into Veritas’s thick and gritty air. Sprinkled with soot, my Adequate lay on the far side of Eighty-second Street. In the old days, I’d heard, you never knew for sure that your car would be unmolested, or even there, when you left it overnight. Dishonesty was so rampant, you started your engine with a key.
I zoomed past the imperially functional cinderblocks that constituted City Hall, reaching the market district shortly before noon. Bless my luck, a parking spot lay directly in front of Molly’s Rather Expensive Toy Store—such joy in emptiness, I mused, such satisfaction in a void.
“My, aren’t you a pretty fellow?” a hawk-faced female clerk sang out as I strode through Molly’s door. Pricey marionettes dangled from the ceiling like victims of a mass lynching. “Except, of course, for that chin.”
“Your body’s arousing enough,” I replied, casting a candid eye up and down the clerk. A Bertrand Russell University T-shirt molded itself around her breasts. Grimy white slacks encased her thighs. “But that nose,” I added forlornly. A demanding business, citizenship.
She tapped on my wedding ring and glowered. “What brings your here? Something for your mistress’s kid sister?”
“My niece is getting burned today.”
“And you’re waiting till the last minute to buy her a present?”
“True.”
“Roller skates are popular. We sold fifteen pairs last month. Three were returned as defective.”
“Lead the way.”
I followed her past racks of baseball gloves and stuffed animals and up to a bin filled with roller skates, the new six-wheeler style with miniature jets in the heels. “The laces break in ten percent of cases,” the clerk confessed. “Last April an engine exploded—maybe you saw the story on TV—and the poor girl, you know what happened? She got pitched into a culvert and cracked her skull and died.”
“I believe Connie likes yellow,” I said, taking down a pair of skates the color of Mom’s Middling Margarine. “One size fits all?”
“More or less.”
“Your price as good as anybody else’s?”
“You can get the same thing for two dollars less at Marquand’s.”
“Haven’t the time. Can you gift-wrap them?”
“Not skillfully.”
“Sold.”
I’d promised Gloria I wouldn’t just come to Connie’s post-treatment party—I would attend the burn as well, doing what I could to keep the kid’s morale up. Normally both parents were present, but that deplorable person Peter Raymond couldn’t be bothered. “I’ve seen better parenting at the zoo,” Helen liked to say of my ex-brother-in-law. “I know alligators who are better fathers.”
You could find a burn hospital in practically every neighborhood, but Gloria had insisted on the best, Veteran’s Shock Institute in Spinoza Borough, a smoke-stained pile of bricks overlooking the Giordano Bruno Bridge. Entering, I noticed a crowd of ten-year-olds jamming the central holding area; it seemed more like the platform of a train station than the waiting room of a hospital, the girls hanging together in nervous, chattering clusters, trying to comfort each other, the boys engaged in mock gunfights around the potted palms, distracting themselves with pseudo violence, pretending not to be terrified of what the day would bring.
Tucking the indifferendy wrapped skates under my arm, I ascended to the second floor. WARNING: THIS ELEVATOR MAINTAINED BY PEOPLE WHO HATE THEIR JOBS. RIDE AT YOUR OWN RISK.
My niece was already in her glass cell, dressed in a green smock and bound to the chair via leather thongs, one electrode strapped to her left
arm, another to her right leg. Black wires trailed from the copper terminals like threads spun by some vile and poisonous spider Toby would have adopted. She welcomed me with a brave smile, and I pointed to her gift, hoping to raise her spirits, however briefly.
Clipboard in hand, a short, cherubic doctor with MERRICK affixed to his tunic entered the cell and snugged a copper helmet over my niece’s cranium. I gave her a thumbs-up signal. Soon it will be over, kid—snow is hot, grass is purple, all of it.
“Thanks for coming,” said Gloria, taking my arm and guiding me into the observation booth. “How’s the family?”
“A rabbit attacked Toby.”
“A rabbit?”
“And then it died.”
“I’m glad somebody besides me has problems,” she admitted.
My sister was a rather attractive woman—glossy black hair, pristine skin, a better chin than mine—but today she looked terrible: the anticipation, the fear. I was actually present when her marriage collapsed. The three of us were sitting in Booze Before Breakfast, and suddenly she said to Peter, “I sometimes worry that you copuluate with Ellen Lambert—do you?”
And Peter said yes, he did. And Gloria said you fucker. And Peter said right. And Gloria asked how many others. And Peter said lots. Gloria asked why—did he do it to strengthen the marriage? And Peter replied no, he just liked to ejaculate inside other women.
After patting Connie on her rust-colored bangs, Merrick joined us in the booth. “Morning, folks,” he said, his cheer a precarious mix of the genuine and the forced. “How’re we doing here?”