Angels Go Naked

by Cornelia Nixon

  “Once they’re dead, they’re dead,” he’d said. “The rest is fake.”

  But by the time she landed at La Guardia, Woody had revived. He grinned when she walked into the room. Clear tubes were hooked behind his ears in a jaunty way and ran into his nose. He looked like the ghost of Calvin, or the fetus, long and thin and pale. Calvin sat on the bed in workboots, jeans, and a tight T-shirt. Calvin and Woody used to call each other “she” and dress in tutus every Halloween. But lately Calvin had been working out, and he seemed to have grown muscles in his arms. Making a fist, he feinted with his left at Woody lying in the bed.

  “This guy was just fooling us. This clod.”

  Woody feinted back. “That’s Sir Clod to you, vassal. Yeah, it was just a ruse to get you here. You fell for it.”

  It was true, he didn’t seem exactly sick, laughing in the bed. He told stories about his dance teacher, who thought he was a football coach.

  “He grunts at us and tries to make us stomp. Kill it, you wuss, he says. Kill it. Crush that step.”

  He teased Calvin about some big, dumb saxophonist he was pining for. Gazing into Margy’s eyes, he gave her hand a stroke.

  “So how are you really?” he asked, exactly like Calvin.

  Finally a nurse asked them to leave. “He needs to sleep.”

  “Yeah,” said Woody. “You guys are putting me to sleep. Go to Max’s party, for God’s sake. Tell him I’ll be there next time.”

  Calvin stood up. “You wish. He’s not inviting you, you churl. And I’m not saying hello to anyone in a lip-ring.”

  They took a cab back to the Village, almost giddy as the lights flashed by.

  “Doctors!” Calvin said, laughing. “I know a guy whose doctor said he had three months to live, and now he runs the New York Marathon. But his doctor, hey! He dropped dead of a heart attack. What makes them think they’re such seers?”

  “Hey, maybe you should get some sleep,” she said. He seemed a little hollow-eyed.

  “No way. Not now. And everyone’ll be so glad to hear that Woody’s fine.”

  At Woody’s cramped apartment, she called Webster to say everything was fine. His machine picked up, though it was dark there by this time. She hung up quietly. In the morning, back from Dana’s bed, he’d hear a click and nothing more. Well, that was fine. After bathing, she put on a silver sweater that emphasized her breasts, tight pants and high heels, and fluffed her hair up high.

  The party was at Calvin’s former teacher’s, up on Riverside. Max had been a famous cellist once, and he still taught (“but only handsome students,” Calvin said). His elegant apartment had a view of yellow lights on black water, and it was packed, with everyone from Leonard Bernstein down to Max’s teenaged protégés. The party had already reached the dancing stage. Music agitated every particle of air. Everyone shouted in someone’s ear. Margy danced with Calvin, then with two guys from Juilliard, cellists who worked with Max but clearly were not gay, glancing at her breasts and looking guiltily away. She’d felt self-conscious all her life, dancing where anyone could see. But what did she care now? She was the most relaxed she’d ever been. Swilling wine, she danced the way Dana walked (men want me).

  Calvin gripped her shoulders, yelled, “You’re radiating sex. What have you been doing out there in the great Wild West?”

  She laughed, tossed back her head, and turned to see a young violinist she had once taught for a few months. Jean-Marc was Alsatian, ringleted, nineteen at most, and the summer she had taught him, he’d followed her around, gazing at her with sad eyes while she told him not to muscle Mozart to his will. Now he cut her out from the two cellists like a collie herding sheep.

  “What are you doing here?” he cried. He kissed her on both cheeks and clutched her arms, though they’d never touched before. “You’ve come to drive me crazy, is that so?”

  They danced, and Jean-Marc kept his hands on her, pushing the hair out of her eyes. After a while, it seemed the friendly thing to let him press his smooth, young tongue into her mouth. He felt fresh and boyish, packed with coiled erotic springs.

  “I never wanted you to be my teacher,” he groaned and pressed his hands all over her, as if trying to collapse her small enough to fold.

  How dull her life seemed usually! All those sexless years, waiting. Why shouldn’t she have lovers everywhere, like Webster or Michael? It was a way to feel no pain. Make a palimpsest of one lover on another and you didn’t feel a thing, except well-being, like some pink magnolia flinging petals wide. She’d have to thank Webster for showing her.

  “SHIT,” Calvin yelled. “FUCKING SHIT.”

  It was still night, and he knelt on the stone abutment of a bridge she didn’t recognize, leaning out above black water. Only a few cars roared by, the bridge deserted in the hot, soggy dark, and she was fairly certain they should not be there. She almost hadn’t caught him, sandals sliding on damp sidewalks, as he ran across deserted roadways, up stairs reeking of piss. When they came back from the party, there had been a message from the hospital telling Calvin to return. It took a while to find a cab, and when they rushed up to Woody’s room, the bed was bare. He had been moved down to the morgue. Above the East River, she got her arms around Calvin’s waist as it bellowed in and out.

  “FUCK. FUCK THIS SHIT.”

  She just held on. There was nothing else to do. It seemed possible that Calvin could die too, the bridge could collapse, time could stop. She kept her arms around him so hard for so long, she couldn’t feel them when he pried them off. He was-n’t crying. He was dignified and seemed to float in calm, his eyes remote and dry. As they walked back to the hospital, the world had ended, and the sky was getting light. She clutched Calvin’s sleeve, and then his wrist, gilded with blond hair. But he did not take her hand.

  California looked like Tuscany with no Florence. Empty hills in vapid yellow light, crawling with rattlesnakes. Poison oak stood ten feet high disguised in morning-glory vines. Roses frothed up pink and red on thorns that never died.

  She’d only come to get her things and say good-bye. This time, she would not shout. Spit would not fly from her mouth. She would get on a plane. Calvin would be in Chicago, and they’d have to deal with new music, the fall season on the way.

  “Call me the second you get in,” said Webster’s tenor on her aunt’s machine. She listened to it twice. It felt like shards of glass exploded in her crotch. Erase, she pushed. Walking to the closet, she pulled out suitcases and began to pack.

  Suddenly the door downstairs burst open, and Webster bounded up, looking like a genie let out of a bottle, gleeful and at large. He swept her up, pressed her full length to him, kissed her neck.

  “Why didn’t you call me? I would have come to meet you.” His head turned toward the closet. “What’s this?” He let her slide down toward the floor. “I see. Were you even going to tell me?”

  Walking into the bathroom, she turned on the tap.

  “Of course I was. I just got here. I haven’t even had a bath, and you know how it feels, all day on planes. I’m covered with transcontinental grit.”

  She waited while the tub filled, but he didn’t answer her. Turning off the tap, she called in a cheerful voice.

  “You know I have to get back now. My aunt will be home soon.”

  Pulling off her linen pants, she tested the water, so hot it alarmed her skin as if with cold.

  “Don’t go yet,” he said behind her. “You could stay in the boathouse when your aunt gets here. Or we could go somewhere.”

  “That might be nice, of course. But then, I have this job, two thousand miles from here. I have to get back.”

  He leaned against the sink and twirled a button on his blue workshirt, clean and freshly ironed. Since when did he wear ironed shirts? She’d never noticed any irons around his place. Did someone do it for him, somewhere else? Sinking into the water, she let it cover her mouth.

  “One of us could move,” he said slowly, looking down. “Get a job in the other’s place.
”

  Something pounced in Margy’s chest. She lifted her mouth above the waterline.

  “That might be something to consider, when we stop seeing other people.”

  His face came into sudden focus. He stared at her. “Seeing other people? I’m not seeing other people. Are you?”

  Really, it was too hot in the tub. Turning on the cold, she swished the water with both hands like a six-year-old.

  “Why, sure. Since you told me you were seeing Dana. It’s all right, I knew it from the start. It’s understood.”

  Keeping both hands behind him on the sink, he seemed braced against a blast. “You slept with someone else. In New York.”

  She hadn’t quite gotten into bed with Jean-Marc, no. But now she wanted Webster to think so. Feeling rather naked, she picked up a washcloth and draped it across her breasts.

  “While you were here, doing the same thing. With Dana.”

  He sprang from the sink, trembling like a tuning fork. “Jesus Christ. What kind of life have you had?”

  In seconds he was down the stairs and out. The slam quivered the walls. The water in the tub rippled, and gradually went still. She wasn’t wrong, was she? Of course she wasn’t wrong. It was too much. A stupid sob leaped up her throat and stopped.

  Downstairs, the door reopened, and the floor groaned with his heavy tread. In seconds, his eyes loomed over her, too large and black, alert, his breath controlled.

  “Listen. Words are treacherous. When I say I’m seeing Dana, I don’t mean I’m fucking her. Sometimes we go out to eat, or we take a walk. That’s it. Nothing else.”

  She shrank down in the tub. “And she cries and tries to get you into bed, and you won’t go?”

  He winced. “Something like that.”

  He stared at the wall above her head. “It wasn’t Calvin? Someone new. You slept with someone new in New York.”

  She went hard, deflecting this. If he hadn’t slept with Dana, what about the rest of them? There had been others, she was sure of it.

  Kneeling on the tile, he took hold of her shoulders, his face six inches from hers.

  “You’re not very observant, you realize that? You think you know what’s happening, but you miss a lot. Like the fact that I’m in love with you. I want to marry you. Come out of there,” he said and lifted her up, stunned and dripping, from the tub.

  It was a hot, dry afternoon in a courtroom usually reserved for small claims and misdemeanors. At the last minute, Calvin had turned up, in the car of a San Francisco friend. He didn’t smile, but he had brought a bag of pink rose petals, and he strewed them on the pale blue carpeting. Webster wore his mallard tie, Margy a linen suit she’d bought three days before, one size too large and altered awkwardly. A good blue suit, her mother had always said, was the only proper thing if you were not a virgin, or divorced, all wrong brides.

  She’d gotten through the last few days mostly asleep, face smashed into Webster’s chest, as if she’d landed there from a great height. In the intervals of wakefulness, she wondered, could you marry someone you had known only two months?

  “When you meet the person you are going to marry, you don’t question it,” Webster had said. With eerie calm, he had made plans to move to Chicago. Lake Michigan had plankton, even jellyfish. He swore it would be only a small change for him.

  Now she felt ghostly, passion-free, translucent, possibly, as she stepped up to the bleakly modern rail, holding Webster’s hand in front of God and the county treasurer. The treasurer was a woman in a Balinese-print suit, ivory elephants on twisted strands around her neck. She opened a wide book, mispronouncing Webster’s name.

  “Love is like the rain,” she said. “Patient and forgiving, falling on parched ground. Love makes it spring year-round.”

  “Elephants died to make your necklace,” Webster said, shaking her official hand.

  Then they were outside, in a mammoth parking lot beside a six-lane freeway ringed with parched gold slopes the size of small mountains. The building was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright to imitate the hills and sky, but painted wrong, pink and royal blue like a Mexican funeral home. Calvin tried to get it in the pictures, standing too far back while Margy and Webster squinted in the sun. Calvin had lost weight, and in the bright sun he appeared thin-skinned, blue under the eyes. A year before, he might have worn pink tulle, or three ties from flea markets. But now he still had on the same black suit and white T-shirt he had worn at Woody’s funeral.

  “Will you be all right?” she asked and clung to him, realizing suddenly that she would get into the car with Webster, and Calvin would not. They had a room reserved on the north coast and had to leave to make it there by dark.

  Calvin snorted. “You’re the one who’s just gone racing full speed off a cliff, and you’re asking me if I’ll be all right?”

  Webster shook his hand, and Calvin seemed to look at him for the first time.

  “Nice tie,” he said.

  Webster loosened it, pulled it off over his head, and held it out like a noose. Calvin looked surprised, ready to refuse.

  “Groom’s gift,” Webster said. “For the best man, you know.”

  Calvin’s chin rose.

  “I was the maid of honor,” he said, dignified. But he slipped the tie over his head and hung it loose on his bare neck. As they drove away, he scattered rose petals over the hood.

  “Wait,” Margy gasped.

  But wait for what? If they were going, they would have to go. Webster stopped the car.

  “You did everything you could to get away from me, and it didn’t work. So you might as well relax.”

  But Margy knew that this was no time to relax. From now on, she would stay alert and notice everything. Nothing would escape her. Sunlight slanted through the windshield, and rose petals shifted on the hood. When the car moved, they flew up, pressed against the glass like small pink tongues, then blew away.

  When a Miwok Takes a Wife

  He used to float his kayak underneath her house and cling to pilings like a barnacle. He listened for her feet, bare skin on wood or little loafers soft as moccasins. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t breathe. The first note of the violin gave him a rush of endocrines so strong he had to put his head between his knees. She liked to play a little sweet-sad melody in minor key, and it was a huge sound, monstrously alive. It took hold of him, stroked under his skin, places he couldn’t reach. He felt swollen like a bruise, ready to split open, bleed.

  “I’m sorry,” was the first thing she ever said to him.

  “Sorry for what?” he wanted to shout. Something about the violin, as if it bothered him. Her eyes bulged green behind thick wire-frames, warped like fish in an aquarium. She gave him the most alive look he had ever seen, curious, half laughing, afraid.

  Now she was his, and he could take her clothes off any time he liked. She had the smoothest skin he’d ever felt, creamy as a fat woman’s, though she was small and fine. It didn’t make a difference how many times he heaved himself at her like a salmon up a waterfall. Parts of him ached on unsatisfied, arms to pull her up against his chest, fingers for her skin. His nose needed to press against her bones, flattening the tip. It was a need he hadn’t known a nose could have. He’d been drawn to women’s flesh since he was nine or ten, never before to women’s bones.

  “What’s the Algonquian for ‘wife’?” she asked as they walked along Bolinas Beach. He didn’t know. Ouiouin was to marry, napema a married man. But the baron’s dictionary gave no word for married women, as if they didn’t count, or didn’t count to the baron. The Miwok might have had one, right here on this beach, but there was no way to find out. A chill ran over him. The wind was picking up, and Margy’s hair waved free like tentacles.

  “Let’s go home.” Hooking an arm around her neck, he pressed his nose into the hard bone of her head.

  She helped him pack his field notes and his books. He sold the kayak, after one last paddle past the reef. He was eager to leave Bolinas now. The place was full of sad
and solitary guys, lonely walkers in the fog, of whom he was no doubt considered one. But his research was all done. He’d write the dissertation in Chicago, and when he had the doctorate, he would become the ocean man in some lake lab. The Great Lakes were like oceans, but more fragile, closed, and the declines he charted would be even more clear. As Margy said, at least in Chicago you knew you weren’t killing anything.

  They drove across the country in an old yellow Mercedes that had been her father’s once. It had ripped leather seats and hints of rust around the rims, but it was so wide and solid, one day they pulled off the road and made love in the back seat, by a sunny pasture, giggling. That was Nebraska, where the sky was high and Western, washed-out blue. The air began to thicken after that. The sky sank lower, gray and wet, until it hung right over them.

  Hours before he thought they had arrived, Chicago came out to meet them. Seven million people behind brick and glass, several thousand square miles of brown buildings hunched three stories tall. Buckled, potholed streets, with bombed-out factories and rusted iron and broken concrete and exploded glass heaped up in empty lots. Plastic grocery sacks blew past. In every block three dumpsters bulged up to capacity. Yellow steam trailed to the ground, scented of steel mills, bus exhaust.

  Margy’s apartment looked over the lake, green and shimmering to the horizon on three sides. But her apartment was a box, not much bigger than the boathouse and six floors off the ground. She followed him from room to room, watching with startled eyes, as if she had not imagined how he’d look inside the place. She brushed against him, gentle as a cat, and pleasure radiated out from where she touched.

  “I need to practice,” she said, note of panic in her voice.

  “Can I listen?”

  Her eyes went wild. “No one ever listens to me practicing.”

  “I did for months.”

  She set her music stand up in the living room, facing the lake, and he retreated to the bedroom with a book. She tuned up, thrashed out some frenetic bars, and stopped. Standing at the bedroom door, she held the bow and violin.