Angels Go Naked

by Cornelia Nixon

  “Yes, we’re going to kiss each other,” he said, and Margy was so happy, she woke up.

  That summer, Michael played in the CSO’s festival at Ravinia, a few miles north of Chicago, a mixed program of Bach, Stravinsky, Brahms, only for one night. He appeared at rehearsal on his own but asked Margy to eat with him on break, and they found a little Russian place, then walked along the lake. He seemed disturbed, fists plunged in the bulged-out pockets of a worn linen jacket, and he lectured her about what was wrong with the orchestra, the music industry.

  “I hate managers and agents and other money-grubbing Philistines. I hate the twentieth century. I refuse to care about money,” he said and glared at her as if she’d said he should. “I hate property, the way it governs the Western imagination. Everything we think is trapped inside of it.”

  He stared down at her ankles, bare in summer flats. Blue-green veins were visible beneath her skin.

  “Do you have on stockings?” he demanded.

  “No, nothing.”

  He looked at her resentfully.

  “But that’s what you are, aren’t you. A blue stocking.”

  They drove back to Ravinia, and Margy changed into her summer concert whites, feeling drained. She leaned against a wall offstage, waiting to go on. When Calvin came out of the dressing room in a crisp white jacket and bow tie, he took one look at her and started kneading her neck. Margy leaned against him, eyes closed, and when she looked up, Michael was coming down the hall toward them, glaring above their heads.

  “What is happening with you and Little Lord Fauntleroy?” he hissed beside her ear the moment he had played his encores, bowed his bows. “What does he think he’s doing, anyway?”

  She suddenly felt mean. The tail of something cold lashed her. Usually they stepped outside to talk, for privacy, but she turned down the hallway toward the crowded dressing rooms.

  “Aren’t you worried about walking so close to me?” she said, hardly moving her lips. “Aren’t you afraid someone will tell your wife?”

  Half the orchestra watched them, but Michael’s hand shot out and gripped her wrist. Veering in one swoop, he pulled her out the side exit. The moment they were alone, he let go.

  “You like to torture me, don’t you,” he said, and strode away into the dark.

  It was a warm and windy night, bright lights wavering, trees surging in the wind, as the crowd streamed toward their cars, taillights blazing red in the lots. Michael walked fast the other way, and she caught up with him under loud, gyrating trees.

  “Are you going back to France?” she said calmly. Gravel crunched under their feet.

  He didn’t answer. So she described the trip she planned to take to Italy, in August, with Calvin.

  “Jesus, it’s just like I said!” he gasped, and looked at her, eyes wild. He turned his face away.

  “August is a lousy time to go,” he said spitefully. “Too hot, and not a single concert anywhere, not even an opera, in the country that invented it. Do you realize that?”

  Margy was so tired she felt blasé. “Yes, I realize that. Well, I’m going home. Good night.”

  She knew it meant she wouldn’t see him again this time. She turned and started walking toward her car. Little pieces of Chicago blew into her eyes, road grit and flakes from people’s shoes. He followed her. When they got to the car, he stood beside her while she unlocked it. He stared away, as if he hated the sight of her.

  “Well, look me up if you’re in Italy,” she said pleasantly, opening the door.

  Michael’s icy eyes came suddenly alive in the streetlight, black dots of the pupils like bullets aimed at her.

  “I never look you up now. What makes you think I would then?”

  All the air rushed out of her. Getting into the car, she slammed the door.

  Michael pounded on the window, waited till she opened it. Awkwardly, he took hold of her wrist, looked down.

  “Tell me where you’ll be and how to get in touch with you. I suppose I might come to Italy.”

  August sun lay panting on the deck of their hotel, waterside by the canal, as randy whiffs of Venice blended with the coffee and the rolls. Calvin was pouting this morning, in a three-piece linen suit, no shirt, and silk necktie knotted loosely around his bare neck. She kept her voice low, underneath the rippling of water all around. She didn’t think the waiters spoke English, but you never knew.

  “Calvin, relax. We did not make love. You don’t have to punish me.”

  Calvin gave her a disdainful glance and looked away.

  “A little less pocket psychology, please.”

  She reached for the butter, and he slapped her wrist.

  “You’re going to get fat, you know. And do you realize you’re twenty-six years old? Practically stale goods. I wouldn’t turn down any more fabulous offers if I were you.”

  They had chosen this hotel for its old-world touches, despite the old-world plumbing moaning in the night, the old-world mattresses, and when a waiter slid toward them, damask towel over one arm, silver salver in the other hand, they stopped to watch. The waiter was in his fifties, tall and upright with the face bones of a god, and a dignity that disapproved of young Americans.

  “Signora, per lei,” he said, and bowed under their deck umbrella, ignoring the sultry look Calvin had fixed on him.

  On the salver was a blue-edged telegram. Margy folded it into her hand. Suddenly the sunlight on the water glinted painfully through her dark glasses. She rose to thread between the tables as Calvin called behind her plaintively.

  “Oh, don’t start being mysterious at this late hour of the day.”

  In the cool dark of the marble lobby, the telegram was a black page. She stared at it until the words emerged.

  “Coming to Venice, looking you up. Hotel Orchidea, 3 P.M.”

  Michael’s room was on the highest floor, windows arched above a tight canal. He’d left them open to the baking sun, and anyone across the way could watch them where they lay, as heat shimmered above the bed and a breeze raised little hairs along the curve of Michael’s back, moving under Margy’s hands. In the canal below, water sighed and slapped. Yellow sunlight crept across the floor and up the stucco wall. Margy tried to memorize each moment, yet she wanted them to end, so they could talk. They had so much to say.

  “We haven’t much time,” was all he had said before, and it was true. Her flight home was only days away, and what would they do then? She wanted to tell him how she had suffered, hear him say the same. When he first leaned over to kiss her, standing by the window of his room, she cried out.

  “I’ve had dreams in which you did that!” she tried to say. But his tongue was reaching down her throat, as if trying to devour her.

  The light grew smoky red, like a blush along the tiered fronts of houses across the canal. Michael lay half over her, smelling not at all like Henry Bergstrom (soap, deodorant, cologne). Instead he smelled like musk and sweat, much more exciting to her nose. His chest was furred with silky hair. Asleep, his face looked artless and naive. Suddenly the eyelids rose, and there he was, assessing her.

  He stretched, rolling off. “That was quite a note you wrote to me.”

  Her face went hot. “I was hoping you’d forget that now.”

  He smiled. “No, no, it was priceless. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Do you always come on like that?”

  “Always?” she said, still too languid to lift her head.

  “With your other lovers.”

  She smiled. “Oh, yes, my million men.”

  “I suppose I know some of them?” he persisted. “They’re mainly musicians, aren’t they?”

  She wrinkled her nose at him. “Oh, sure. And yours? All musicians?”

  He frowned. “No need to talk about that. But really, do you always have to pretend it’s love, like Tristan and Isolde?”

  She sat up. “Pretend it’s love? I haven’t been pretending. I haven’t been to bed with anyone for years.”

  He glanced at
her, concerned. “But that’s so ascetic!”

  “That’s not ascetic. I only wanted you, is all.”

  She felt ashamed. Everything she said seemed so naive. Clutching the sheet around her, she tried to cover herself, gradually hearing what he’d said before.

  “Do you mean to say, you had the nerve to think I was in love with you, when I only wrote you that—”

  “No, no!” he broke in. “Not until after I said no to you.”

  She stood up, trailing the sheet. Postcoital aggression on this level was a new one, but she could handle it. At the window, sheet secured around her like a strapless gown, she studied the dark houses across the way until she felt more calm.

  “Yes, and wasn’t that an ascetic thing to do, saying no to me? Haven’t you denied yourself too, because of your kids? And whatever it is that happened to your marriage,” she added, stepping gingerly into this new territory.

  Michael’s face contracted with amusement in the gloom.

  “My marriage. My wife, as you always call her, as if we were good burghers going to church. Not everyone is so conventional.”

  She steadied herself on the window arch. In the sky outside, the last pigeons winged home to San Marco. A rim of gold gleamed on a dome she didn’t recognize.

  “So you’re not married after all?”

  He leaned back on the pillow, spread his arms.

  “The last romantic. It’s not a property arrangement between us. We keep money out of it, and we don’t own each other’s bodies. You could have found that out a long time ago, if you’d asked. But you don’t ask questions, do you? I realized that a while ago, when we were screwing. You don’t know anything about me.”

  “Rules, you said. Rules are good. You have lots of erotic opportunities, but you restrict yourself to only one.”

  He chuckled. “What a memory you have. But it was just a metaphor, a very effective one, I see, since you remembered it.”

  She found the silky yellow sundress she had put on eagerly that afternoon. Her flesh felt dead inside it, and she lashed it on like a bandage. From the bed, Michael watched, looking contemplative.

  “Listen. I want you to know that I’ve been touched by this passion you’ve developed for me. But you should realize it has nothing to do with me. It has to do with things you have no control of. The idea you have of me is a fiction.”

  She looked for her underpants, her sandals, her barrettes, all lost on the dark floor.

  “And yours of me is not?”

  “It wouldn’t be gallant to say no.”

  His voice was quiet, reasonable, in the dark.

  “Tell me, did you get along with your father? Was he frequently absent when you were small? You must realize that’s the reason why you fall in love with strangers and write them revealing notes.”

  Margy stood still. “And for you it has been?”

  He let a thoughtful pause go by.

  “Tolerance,” he said. “Tolerance, and a willingness to give people what they seem to want, if I like them.”

  “Tolerance!” she shouted. Spit flew from her mouth.

  She controlled her voice. “So you think you were not involved?”

  “No, no! I don’t think that. I was lusting after you, too. And it was very nice.”

  Reaching from the bed, he tried to take her hand, but she recoiled. He sighed like a parent with a screaming child.

  “And I hope it won’t be the last time. But, you see, I’ve been as interested in talking to you as anything, seeing what I can learn from you. This is not the season of sensuality with me. This is the season of intellectual interests.”

  After a silence, he asked calmly, “How do you meet your men?”

  The stones of the street were cool below the bare soles of her feet, with the hint of water underneath. She’d found her sandals at the last second, but broke the thong of one in her rush to get away, and now she held them in her hands, stepping blindly down the darker streets. In the lighted squares, she could see groups of men, and she’d learned to stay away from them. She’d been in Rome about ten minutes when the first man had followed her. Sometimes they kept it up for miles, offering her money, saying what they planned to do to her, usually in English, as if they knew she was American, therefore attainable. She bought Italian clothes, pinned her hair up flat. But tonight her barrettes lay somewhere on the floor of Michael’s room, with her underpants. Groping barefoot through the dark, she could feel her hair wave in wild curls, the evening breeze like hands beneath her dress, on her naked buttocks, on her sex.

  “Blue under the eyes?” Michael had said in the lit hall, catching her chin to peer into her face. It was, he said, a sign of orgasm to the French. Shaking his fingers off, she bolted down the stairs and out the door.

  Across a lighted square, she could see the cleft of black that meant the Grand Canal, where there might be gondolas, a vaporetto stand. But she had to cross the campo first, avoiding several strolling bands of men. Leaving the shadow, she darted toward a tree, and heard a male voice call out gleefully.

  “Ola, cocca!” it cried, and others quickly answered it.

  She dove into an alley, putrid with a reek of fish and urine, landing once on something soft and wet. A man panted behind her now.

  “Tesora mia, carina,” he moaned, closer every step.

  The alley opened on a quay, not far from the spot where Calvin had dropped her off that afternoon. She’d told him her aunt had come to town, and that she’d find her own way back. But now there were no gondolas in sight, except one, tied up at the quay, and it was occupied.

  Four shoes scuffed the paving stones behind her now.

  “I make you feel like burst melon,” one man murmured musically. “I make you scream like cat in heat.”

  She glanced around for a café, anything with lights. One man put a hand on her arm. She shook him off, but he came back, as if her bare feet were a license, and he could see she’d lost her underpants.

  “Cinquanta mille. Sessanta,” he hissed into her ear, and boldly gave her buttock one quick stroke.

  In the gondola beside the quay, the passenger rose up. It was a figure shrouded all in black, black cape and black three-cornered hat with a white mask, the bautta worn by Contarinis and Foscaris and Grimanis centuries before, to slip into each other’s bedrooms unannounced, or lug someone to the Canale Orfano in a sack.

  “Ahh-eeeeee!” the figure shrieked, spread wide the black wings of its cape, and leaped out of the gondola, landing near them on the paving stones, showing white tennies with no socks. Letting go of Margy, the two men shrank back.

  “Unhand that maiden!” the figure cried, taking up a fencing stance, but they already had.

  On the way back in the gondola, Calvin rode with one foot on the prow, facing forward like George Washington, still in his cape and mask.

  “God, that was exhilarating,” he kept saying with a shudder, shoulders back, one hand tucked, Napoleonic, to his diaphragm. He had just had a hunch, he said, like Superman, and waited there for hours at fabulous expense. But it was worth it, every lire.

  “Unhand that maiden!” he cried, flourishing his arms inside the cape.

  “Bene, bene,” said the gondolier behind them, every time.

  Leaning on the rail, Margy let her hand trail down into the water, where it was cool and alive. The tide was at its height, and she could feel it flowing in from all the oceans of the world, past rocks and locks and sea walls, over barriers of every kind, swamping the piazza of San Marco ankle deep and seeping underneath the streets to soak the ancient oaks that held the city up, in slow dissolve, until one day the towers would begin to fall, the heavy bells, the domes and marble halls, the lions in gold leaf, all waiting for the flood to rise and float them free.

  By the Shining Big Sea Waters

  Webster grew his hair out long in graduate school, because it made him look less white. Straight, crow-black, it shone like fur and brought out the hawk in his nose. He was in Berkeley at the ti
me, but even in Berkeley men got haircuts now. Students cut theirs shorter every year, streamlined, as if for a quick getaway, and stuck a diamond in one ear. In Berkeley the ’60s had died, and rotted. It had happened long ago, when Webster was still setting model planes on fire and shooting them with BBs from a window of his mother’s house. He liked to start the fire down in the yard, run inside, and shoot the flaming airplane from upstairs. Once he did it to a model boat, floating and flaming on a bucket full of water, till a well-placed BB sank the boat and put the fire out.

  Now he was a sober lab assistant, working for a doctorate in oceanic microbiology. He showed freshmen how to suck sea-urchin sperm into a tube, line the egg up in the scope, add a drop of sperm, and watch. He caught a worm for them, like a live lace ribbon undulating up through water into light, a worm that took four hundred million years to make and would become extinct in their short lives, so they could have hair dryers and disposable pens. When he published his first paper, on the decline of plankton shrimp in intertidal waters, he used a new last name, an Algonquian word that meant “he lives beside the sea.” He found it in the only dictionary of that tongue, written three hundred years before by a French baron. Leatherbound, small and thick on rugged parchment, it was made for the saddlebags of lone white men, invading forest trails. Webster had to struggle with the French, the antique script, every S shaped like a florid F. But he worked it out. Unutshimakitshigamink, that was it. Webster Unutshimakitshigamink.

  “White man is like the coyote,” he explained. “Pisses on his kill, so nothing can eat it, not even him.”

  In the lab, his friends all stared, waited for him to grin. Most of them had known him and each other since MIT, and the rest of them still worked past midnight as a group, trooped out for pizza late, told jokes from the “Three Stooges.”

  “Webster, You Nut,” they started calling him. “Webster Nutmink, last of the Mohican braves. How, chief.” They patted their mouths with open hands. “Who-wa-oo-wa-oo-waoo.”