Angels Go Naked

by Cornelia Nixon

  After the Beep

  Margy changed her clothes six times. She took her glasses off, put them back on, and studied the effect. If she left them on, it meant she knew about the other women, that he wasn’t breaking up with them. If she took them off, it meant she thought she had a chance, though he was six-foot-four and looked like Hiawatha, Strong-Heart, Loon-Heart, wearer of the Magic Mittens, owner of the Magic Moccasins. They were a few miles north of San Francisco, on a cold and beautiful lagoon, and she had come to house-sit for her aunt, on her summer break. She had planned to practice violin and enjoy the famous view. Instead, she watched the boathouse on the dock, where Hiawatha lived. Black hair rippled shining to the middle of his back, which was honed hard as a blade, with smooth brown skin. He had a kayak that he lifted up over his head as if it weighed nothing, set it in the water, paddled out into the surf. She watched women stalk like zombies out his dock, mouths slack with dumb longing. One day he stood and gazed down tenderly at one of them. Margy felt suddenly that she had wasted her life.

  “Word to the wise,” her aunt had said before she left. “San Francisco men, you know, they’re spoiled. There are about a hundred women here for every straight guy, so, hey, why should they settle down? Webster keeps them guessing, let me tell you.” Her aunt’s husband had left her for a girl their children’s age, and her aunt’s normal expression was a grin of rage.

  Margy left her glasses on and mashed her hair back in a bun. She put on the jeans and leotard she wore to practice violin, and flats. She’d had enough ambition in her life. Now she was ready to relax.

  “Relax!” people always said to her, as if she were driving them insane.

  “You look good, but you seem to be a very nervous person,” the personnel director at the symphony had lately snapped, as if to say that nervous people did not make it on the violin. Her friends gave her books on how to make the mind a perfect pale-peach blank. It seemed to be a way to get you out of touch with your feelings. But what had feelings ever done for her?

  Webster showed up in a wrinkled dress shirt, jacket, tie, saddle oxfords that made his feet look huge. The tie was too short for his big chest, black geese flying on a field of mallard green. Margy felt so nervous suddenly, she thought she might pass out.

  “Where did you find that tie?” she cried. “Have you owned it since junior high?” It was an awful thing to say. She felt mortified. Her cheeks flamed.

  He looked down, slowly flushed. “I guess it was my dad’s. It’s the only one I’ve got.”

  “It’s all right,” she almost sobbed, her eyes filling. Oh, Christ, she was in love with him. How could she be? She did-n’t even know this man.

  While they drove, she tried to relax, telling him about Calvin, who would have killed for Webster’s mallards probably. Webster directed her to a loud Mexican place in Mill Valley, where she drank sangria much too fast. By the time their chimichangas had arrived, she was quite drunk. It helped her see the secret motions in the restaurant. Women stared at Webster, astonished and electrified. They walked out of their way to pass by him. He didn’t seem to notice as he calmly talked about his work on plankton jellyfish. He told her how he’d changed his name and tried to live off the land, making no trash, like his Algonquin ancestors.

  “Younutshimawhat?” she said, trying not to grin. “What was it before?”

  “Never mind. It isn’t my name anymore.” He started to smile too. “Oh, all right, if you must know. It was Hale. Webster Hale. Puritan enough for you?”

  For a moment they both laughed.

  “So how did you do at living like your ancestors, making no trash?”

  He shrugged helplessly. “I made more trash that year than ever. It shed off me, no matter what I did. Then I noticed, everyone who does this kind of work lives on some pristine beach, and all of us complain about our fellow men, the ones who’re ruining the pristine beach. Now I want to finish up my project and get out of here. I want to go live in some city where I can’t hurt anything. I dream of cities now.” He gave her a long, slow stare. “I can’t believe I lived without music until you got here.”

  Margy tipped back her head and smiled. That must be the stare that made those other women lose their minds. His voice alone should be enough to warn off anyone. It was an urgent tenor, Pinkerton, not Sharpless, the baritone, the one that you could trust. A tenor with a voice like that would get the girl, betray her, wind up sorry when she’s dead.

  “I’m sorry if it bothers you,” she said.

  He leaned in closer to her, stared into her eyes. “Don’t you get it? You are one great violinist. Would you please leave the windows open when you play?”

  “Not great,” she said quickly. “Just competent.”

  It said so on her annual reports: ‘Competent and versatile, but too nervous. Needs to relax.’

  She asked about his childhood, if he rode bareback on the lone prairie.

  “The only horses I ever got on were the wooden ones in Central Park, the ones that go around and around. The only adults I ever knew were into Freud. If you have, say, a little reaction formation you’d like to talk about, just let me know. You see, I’m not the savage that you think. I even played piano for a while.”

  “Not piano,” Margy groaned. “I’ve never known a pianist who didn’t break my heart.”

  Webster’s eyes went slightly crossed. “I swear I never learned a thing, except ‘Chopsticks’ and ‘Moon River’ with one hand. I can’t even whistle on key. Okay, I did once play ‘The Moonlight Sonata’ for a whole summer. Does that mean I have to break your heart?”

  She started to laugh, and tears slid down her cheeks.

  They split the check and went to find the film they’d picked, a revival of a heartwarming French comedy about a woman who accidentally has sex with her teenaged son. Margy had seen it several times, and she whispered to Webster, giggling, on the best lines.

  “Royaliste,” the son says, when asked if he is liberal or conservative.

  “‘Royaliste,’” she whispered next to Webster’s ear, so close his hair brushed her cheek. He smelled like warm sand, sun, a week on a Greek isle. Okay, she’d go to bed with him. Why not? A summer romance, light as a French film. After that, she’d watch the girls walk out his dock, and Webster leave with them, and—and—wave lightly, since they were just friends.

  She sat up, pushed her glasses up her nose, and tried to pay attention to the film. But it seemed poignant now, the mother desperate for love, as if she hadn’t many chances left, when she was only thirty-two. Margy was twenty-eight. In the dark, she smiled until her cheeks began to ache.

  Driving back, she tried to start laughing again.

  “Don’t you love the French? The way they do the cancan up to the abyss?”

  He answered fast, out of the dark side of the car, as if he had been waiting to be asked. “Have you ever seen a French movie that wasn’t making fun of something like incest or adultery? That great comic subject, betrayal? Almost as funny as suicide.”

  She let out her air. “Oh, well. It isn’t necessary to be serious all the time, is it?” She laughed, to let him see how unserious she could be. “I mean, doesn’t it make a difference how you take it? Sometimes it’s a joke.”

  She felt shellacked, encased in plastic. She could not get out. It wasn’t safe to stop talking. She mentioned several of her favorite movies, Cousin, Cousine, Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Rules of the Game.

  “The French aren’t puritans, like us, and we only pretend to be. I mean, we do the same things here, don’t we? We just don’t talk about it. There’s as much betrayal here, only less honesty.”

  Look at you! was what she meant. Some puritan. She wanted to sound light and teasing, French.

  In the silence that followed, he seemed to cloud up next to her. Gloom filled the car. The radio picked up Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No. 1, the great concert by Horowitz in the dark days of World War II. When it was clear he wasn’t going to answer her, she turned it up an
d sang along, the phony Broadway words.

  “‘Oh, what exciting moments we share when we’re all alone at last!’”

  The music lasted while they crested the mountain and descended into fog along the sand.

  “Thank you for a lovely evening,” she said at her door and offered him her hand. Webster looked down, not taking it.

  “Charmed, I’m sure,” he said and walked away.

  She paced the house, too tense to sit. The way he walked away from her, as if she were the one with all the lovers, flaunting them! We do the same things here, she had said. Surely he didn’t think she meant herself? That was absurd! It was insane!

  Charging from room to room, she ran a hot bath, put on Pavarotti and Freni—“Che gelida manina”—and scrubbed all trace of chimichangas from her skin. Drying off, she put on a heavy white silk robe that was suitable for Harlow or Garbo. It had been her mother’s once, and it was too big for her, but she rolled up the sleeves. This was who she was, a nervous runt who loved only the opera, Tchaikovsky, her dead mother, and her friends.

  Picking up the phone, she tapped in Calvin’s number. He was in New York this summer, with his twin brother, and it was three A.M. there, but he always said to wake him up if she so much as had a bad dream. When other people gazed over her head, Calvin peered into her eyes and asked her how she was really. She didn’t know his brother well, and she was jealous of the way they were attached. Woody was also gay from birth, and they seemed not just identical but Siamese.

  Their machine picked up.

  “Hope you have the taste of joy in your innocent mouth. Just remember, you never know where that joy has been.” It sounded like Calvin but might have been Woody.

  She cleared her throat and tried her husky alto. “‘I’m through with love, I’ll never fall again. Through with love—’”

  Beep, said the machine and cut her off.

  Startled, she almost shrieked. Even machines misunderstood her suddenly. Had she vanished, out here in this vacant place? She was misunderstood. Maligned.

  She had to make sure Webster knew. She tried dialing 411 (younutshimawhat?), but of course he wouldn’t have a phone. Ruining the pristine beach!

  Down the stairs, she burst barefoot onto the dock, trailing the heavy robe. Wood slats sprang back as she stepped on them and propelled her toward his door. The boathouse was dark, a shadow on black water. She didn’t care. She knocked.

  “So, it’s like this,” she said as he stood almost naked in baggy shorts that gleamed whitely in the gloom. His bones are very long, she thought. Extensions everywhere, in shins and thighs, a waist that tapered down to flat and then continued on. Wide chest, long arms and hands, as they reached out to pull her up to him.

  “I live in Chicago, you live here,” she gasped.

  “Not right now,” he said against her ear and stretched out a long foot to close the door.

  They lay like bodies washed up on the sand, in his bed, her bed, on the floor. She seemed to have a different body, with an effervescent glow. She couldn’t think of anything except his skin. There was a hollow under his shoulder that fit her cheek. Lapsing unconscious there, she drooled on it. This must be what infants felt, nursing. She dreamed the ground opened and he fell into the crack. She tried to grab him, but he woke her up.

  “Why are you hitting me?” he said and laughed.

  “I was trying to save you!”

  “You were hitting me. On the chest, like this.” He showed her with his fist.

  “No,” he said when she tried to move away. “You don’t just get up afterward. This is part of it too.”

  He held her, lying on his back with his big feet up. Slender at the heels, they gradually splayed out, widening to long, prehensile-looking toes. He pressed his forehead into hers.

  “I can see a tiny Webster in your eyes,” he said. “And he has this monstrous nose.”

  But it wasn’t monstrous, it was perfect, like the rest of him. He liked to bring her tea in bed, fetch socks for her when it was cold, cook, and do the dishes. Once when she left him alone in her aunt’s house, he vacuumed it. Once he caught a huge seabass and baked it hours after it was caught. It was the best meal of her life. He brought his microscope to show her plankton jellyfish, beautiful veiled forms that soared across the light, graceful as the dancing hippos in Fantasia. He read to her out loud, about the history of pencils, the way the Greeks had practiced medicine. He started reading up on the human wrist, hoping to help her be the world’s first pain-free violinist.

  “When do you turn into a vampire?” she asked.

  “Oh ye of little faith,” he said and gave her a back massage when she had finished practicing.

  One afternoon while he was out, a beautiful brunette strolled out along the dock and into the boathouse. She had smooth hair sculpted to move with her when she walked, and big breasts pushed up in a tight bandeau, body rolling free as if to say men want me.

  “Who is that sexy brunette you see?” she asked when she saw him next.

  His face went neutral. “I guess you mean Dana.”

  “An old friend?”

  “We used to live together. I see her once a week or so.”

  Some sort of awful hormone roared through Margy.

  “Okay. That’s good to know.”

  It wasn’t actually betrayal, was it, if they told you from the start? She decided not to watch the dock when she was practicing. One was enough.

  She gave him a phone and answering machine, because how else could they conduct a civilized affair in 1982? He called her when he wanted to come over, and most nights he did. One night, she didn’t see him leave, but the boathouse lights were off. She called to check. He wasn’t home.

  “This is a machine,” his taped voice said, deep and calm.

  She ate alone, tried not to watch for the boathouse lights. When the phone rang, she dove for it.

  “Hey, Pappagena,” said Calvin’s voice.

  The downward lurching in her chest made it hard to hear. When she could, Calvin was saying someone—Woody?—had been sick. He couldn’t shake the flu and had a strange blood count.

  “It’s probably nothing. I’m going to make him eat his broccoli. You should see the guy, like some Victorian lady with the vapors. It may be love. I introduced him to this hunk who plays the piccolo, you know, and the guy had tattoos on his neck and about a three-pound ball hung from his lower lip. How he gets the embouchure, nobody knows. It was too much for poor Woody. I may have to have him exorcised.”

  She stretched the cord to reach the window. Still dark on the dock. What was Webster doing right that second? He liked to make love every night, and in the morning too.

  “Why don’t you both come out here, lie around the beach?” she said dreamily. “It’s not real warm here, but it’s packed with gorgeous guys.”

  Calvin sounded impatient. “Hey, you’re not listening, are you? Woody is a bit too sick to fly all over the country. He has to see his doctor about twice a day. What are you doing out there, anyway? Boffing Hiawatha?”

  It was just a lucky guess. She’d only mentioned Webster once. She didn’t tell her love life anymore to Calvin, who used any fact she told him as a long needle for prodding her.

  “Paul Bunyan,” she said. “Johnny Appleseed.”

  Calvin chuckled. “I knew it, you saucy wench. He’s not a pianist, is he?”

  When they hung up, silence boomed through the house. She called Webster again, no luck.

  Suddenly, without meaning to be, she was on the dock. The boathouse door was never locked. Inside, she flicked on his light. She hardly had to look.

  A plate of homemade brownies sat on his lab table, still fresh. “Happy Birthday, Pooka” was inscribed inside a vegetarian cookbook in lavender ink, with a heart dotting the i. “Love Always, Dana.” A single earring lay under the bed, long, dangling, of beaten copper flakes, the kind that tinkled when you walked. Margy had never even pierced her ears. You couldn’t play the violin with something f
lapping from your lobes.

  She went home, took a tranquilizer, tried to sleep. She woke up every hour until dawn, but the boathouse lights did not come on.

  The next night, he showed up, cheerful and relaxed. Every few minutes as they cooked, he put his arms around her or nuzzled her ear.

  “Hey, I’m trying to do something here,” she said and squirmed away.

  They made love that night, and in the morning, and went on that way for a week, until he disappeared again. Margy couldn’t even practice violin. Her whole body hurt. Why did she fall in love like this, with men who never would love her?

  One morning he stayed late with her, making love a second time. Yellow sun shone on the sheets, windows open to cool, salty air. A voice called just below, “Baby?”

  The voice was fruity, sexy, the way Dana walked. Webster stopped moving, gripped Margy’s shoulders as if to silence her, though she wasn’t making noise.

  “Where are you, babe?”

  The boathouse door swung open with a groan, Dana’s sandals scuffing as she sauntered in. Webster kept his face pressed into Margy’s neck as their sweat dried.

  “Can you get here?” said Calvin’s voice.

  It was August and the middle of the night, Margy startled out of sleep on Webster’s chest. Woody now had meningitis and had suddenly gone into a steep decline. Calvin’s voice was bleak.

  “His heart stopped a while ago. But they tortured him and brought him back.”

  “No, wait,” she gasped.

  Webster had told her how, when he was nine years old, he had tried to bring dead birds to life. Using two extension cords, severed with their wires exposed, he had knocked himself across the room, blowing a fuse. Another time he had frozen some crickets, still alive, then thawed them out. Nothing ever came back to life.