Angels Go Naked

by Cornelia Nixon

  “I’m too aware of you, but I need to get used to it. Maybe you could come in here?”

  He stood behind her while she played, watching her body merge into the instrument. Her hair was pinned up, flattened to her head to keep it off the strings, and her neck looked much too small to stand the way it clutched the violin. He moved in, brushed his lips across the fine gold down, the little vertebrae shifting. She shivered. Goosebumps prickled on her skin. Craning her head around, she looked at him.

  “Play that again,” he said into her ear and stroked her breasts. She leaned against him, played the sweet-sad melody that used to torture him. How much better was this now!

  She started to rehearse for the fall season, and he made a home for them. He found a store that had organic vegetables and meat, shampoo in bulk, no need to buy plastic. The city of Chicago had no recycling, but he drove their glass and metal up to Evanston. He found a midwife who could teach them natural birth control, requiring no poisons, no trash, no plastic wrap, except for a few days each month. They learned the signs her body made, as it prepared to be unsafe, and tracked them on a chart.

  “It’s a little drama every month,” she said. “The music starts, the curtain parts, and then, voila, the egg!”

  She got him a ticket to her first concert, in a high balcony. He watched her through his field glasses, her hair the only spot of yellow in a sea of black, her arm pumping in time with all the rest. But they had to pay for him, and it was fabulously expensive. So most nights he stayed home and played her records or the radio. After a while he thought he could tell Bach from Brahms, Schoenberg from Stravinsky, Mozart from everyone. He tried to find the little sweet-sad tune Margy played, and never heard it anywhere.

  “It’s nothing,” Margy said.

  “What is it? Don’t you know?”

  “I’m not sure. My head’s too full of music. I must have heard it somewhere.”

  “I bet you made it up.”

  “I doubt it. I’ve never made up anything.” But she looked pleased, secretly.

  When she was finished for the night, they drank a glass of wine and talked about her day. Once it was a guest conductor who berated them all afternoon, made them play the same phrase fifty-seven times. Then he beamed at them all through the show as if they’d done it perfectly, when it sounded just the same. Another time it was a soprano who used a French accent, pretended not to know some ordinary English words, though she was from Detroit.

  “Complètement fou. How do you say?” She’d wave a hand, giving a Gallic shrug. She wanted everyone to think she had a glamorous background, when she was Motown all the way. Margy overheard a hapless journalist ask her what instrument she played.

  “I’m Linda Gaudreau,” she said, as if to crush him with her name.

  Webster filled the tub for Margy, rubbed her shoulders till she could relax. He dried her off and carried her to bed, stroked her to sleep. Mornings he woke her up with orange juice and tea, coaxed her to stay a while before she started practicing. But finally he had to let her go, to do it all again.

  He made a lab table out of a door and squeezed it into the dining room. He taped his field notes on Aurelia around the walls. The last year in Bolinas, he had noticed something odd about the jellyfish. He could always find their early plankton forms along the reef, the ones that looked like many-legged worms or plantlike polyps rooted to a rock. But no matter how often he searched, he rarely found the final two stages. They had to break free first as swimming stars, to reach the final transformation, when they grew legs and bent them back, turned inside out to form the bell-shaped bodies they would keep. Only then did they gain sex, grow up to spawn.

  Why were they stalling out instead as eunuch polyps? It could be a form of birth control. Animals knew when to keep their numbers down, as did the Indians. A Miwok woman with two children gave up any other to be killed at birth, the father stomping on its neck, so there would always be enough army worms to go around. But jellyfish were not just in decline. They’d disappeared beyond a certain stage, less like birth control than mass suicide.

  He analyzed the water on the reef for every kind of chemical, but it was cleaner than it had been in the 1970s. It was also a bit warmer, but less than a degree, and state-funded scientists made light of the change at conferences. Aurelia aurita lived in every ocean, including the China Sea and Gulf of Mexico, where water temperatures could rise to 85 degrees. It could adapt to live at nine degrees below its lethal limit. Near Bolinas, on the other hand, the water felt like ice, a frigid 59 even in summertime. So why should tiny rises make a difference?

  One day in the airless Berkeley library, he found an obscure study on the plankton jellyfish of north Scotland. The ocean there was almost arctic, and jellyfish lived happily. Except, the Scottish researcher noticed, even the smallest rise in temperature seemed to stall them at the polyp stage, especially when food supplies were down. Webster’s first published article had shown that plankton shrimp were in decline off the California coast. And plankton shrimp happened to be the favorite food of baby jellyfish.

  His adviser let him set up tanks to demonstrate the theory in his Berkeley lab, with sterile sea water he made himself. Webster captured baby jellyfish to live in them and plankton shrimp for them to eat, but just enough to duplicate their food supplies out in the ocean now. Three tanks he kept as cold as the ocean in a normal year, three warmer by one-half degree. After a month, the cold tanks swarmed with floating stars and miniature medusas, not quite big enough to see. But in the warm tanks, polyps drooped their tentacles, began to die.

  So it was clear then, wasn’t it? And all he had to do was write up the results. Perched at his lab table in Margy’s dining room, index fingers poised above his manual typewriter, he wondered where to start. “Global warming,” “geothermal disaster,” “ethical insanity”?

  He typed the first few lines.

  “Hey!” Margy called from where she stood playing the violin, about ten feet away. “Could you maybe do that in six-eight time?”

  He moved to the wobbly kitchen table, but it wasn’t far enough away. The violin seemed suddenly too loud, like arrows on his skin. He took the typewriter into the bathroom, closed the door, and hunched on the cold tile floor. All his length contorted in a fold, like a cicada trying to molt, he stared up through the only window at the sky. Sometimes a cloud went by, sometimes a gull.

  After a month, he’d tapped out all he could, though the result was shorter than he’d hoped. He made up a few charts and graphs, put all the numbers in, threw in a sermon at the end. The case he’d made was strong. He didn’t need to pad it out. One warm fall day, he packed the pages up and mailed them off to his adviser in Berkeley.

  Waiting for the reply, he bought books on lakes, full of the digestive tracks of worms. Mornings, while Margy practiced, he took his run, dipped sample jars along the lake. So far, when he checked them in the microscope, he found almost nothing in them wiggling. But even in the fall there should be plankton, and he started swimming out into the warm green lake to look for them. He swam a quarter mile, then a half mile from shore, before he took the cap off the sample jar. Any day now he might find what he was looking for, Crustacea, Gastropoda, Scyphozoa glimmering beneath the scope.

  “I had the strangest dream,” Margy said one morning in the kitchen as he was getting ready to set off. “We were in Bolinas, making love, and my aunt came in. When she left, we tried again, but your penis was detached. I tried to put it in myself, but it was wobbly as a worm. I held it up and said, ‘You ought to keep this attached to yourself!’”

  “Jesus,” Webster said. He had a large erection suddenly, so big it seemed to pull the skin tight on his whole body.

  Margy laughed, reached for his shorts. “That’s some reaction to castration. Or was it because I wanted to put even your detached penis inside of me?”

  Webster couldn’t say, didn’t care. He just wanted to go back to bed. It was a Sunday, and she went with him. They spent the whole
morning in bed, then strolled out, leaning on each other, ate sushi for lunch. They took a cab to the aquarium. Everywhere they went, she whipped out credit cards or twenty-dollar bills to pay, while Webster watched uneasily.

  “You’ll take a year off when I have a job,” he murmured in her ear as they stared at long-nosed tropical turtles. Margy beamed up at him, green eyes shining.

  “I don’t need a year off. That is, unless we have a baby.”

  Webster kissed her head. The need for babies seemed somewhat diminished, here in the aquarium, where everyone had two or three in strollers, toddling off to heave their juice bottles into the alligator pen. Meanwhile, the California otters had to swim around a tank about the size of a Volkswagen van. Paddling on their backs, they circled rapidly, knowing where the corners were.

  “What?” they seemed to say, turning furry faces toward the crowd behind the glass. “What do you want?”

  Webster lay awake for several nights, imagining how he could liberate the sea otters. He’d get a job at the aquarium, try to become the otters’ keeper and possess the keys. He’d put them in a crate and drive them to the airport, forge the health certificates, and take them on a plane. Once in San Francisco, he would drive them down to Monterey and watch them swim away. But could he keep the otters happy through the move? There might be guards at the aquarium, even in the middle of the night. He saw himself with the three otters in a golf bag, terrified and squealing, the cops stopping him. The cops would not know how to take care of the otters. It might hurt them in the end. Should he work through legal channels instead, and start a movement, bumper stickers, billboards on the street? It would take funds, a catchy slogan. “Otters Oughter Have a Bigger Pen”?

  Haggard from lack of sleep, he started to include the aquarium on his daily run. He ran around it, looked at all the doors. It was a little nuts, but he couldn’t help himself. He was starting to suspect that this was not a healthy place for otters or for anyone. Past the aquarium, a point projected out into the lake, and he swam out from it to dip his sample jars. But when he checked them through the scope, nothing was in them, nothing, not a living thing.

  One day, as he came back from his run and swim, the mailman was just slouching up their block, a big blond Pole who left the smell of cigar smoke even inside the envelopes. He was a fan of Margy’s, and he liked to give her his opinion of the last thing she had played. (“That Mahler was a little over-Bached,” he’d say around his cigar. “Mahler should be mushy, not precise.”) Sometimes he brought no mail for weeks, then piles of it, well smoked.

  “Nice as California!” he called and grinned, exhaling smoke. And it was true, it was a clear fall day, if you ignored the smells of sulfur and roof tar.

  The man had dropped a package off, and he recognized the envelope, rumpled, crossed out, readdressed. His dissertation, returned. His adviser must have things he wanted fixed. He ripped the flap off as he climbed the stairs, dripping. It smelled exactly like cigar.

  Inside, with the pages he had typed, was an article just out in an important journal, citing Webster’s shrimp work as “the kind of simple-minded environmentalism rampant in the field today,” this part highlighted in yellow to make sure he saw it. Shrimp populations varied according to their own laws, the author said, and global warming, pesticides, and fertilizers played no part. At the end of the article, after the author’s name, was the name of a major West Coast power company.

  “I thought you might get away with it,” his adviser’s letter said. “But it looks like not. This time you’ll have to rub their noses in it. Do the chemistry on the beasts themselves and prove that it’s the temperature and nothing else. Then see what they have to say.”

  Webster read the letter twice, slower the second time. To show chemical changes in the jellyfish, he’d have to murder millions of them in the lab machines, become the Butcher of Bolinas, a one-man jellyfish blight. His adviser was a grizzled, bearded Englishman with jowls who wore the same tan corduroys week after week and had once done major work on early eye-bud development in crabs, which had required the sacrifice of several thousand animals. Webster avoided killing anything. He liked to nurse the jellyfish until they were just big enough to see, each one a small disturbance on the surface of the water, then ferry them out to the reef and watch them pulse away. Was he supposed to net the same ones now and crush them into little piles of sodium and ash?

  He wrote a letter to his adviser: “Jellyfish numbers are already down. Doing the chemistry would be like euthanizing Bengal tigers to find out why hunters slaughter them. You know I’m right. The population studies are enough. I’ll do more research, but not if it means hurting jellyfish.”

  “How important is this to you, Hale?” his adviser wrote back, though he knew that was no longer Webster’s name. “It isn’t going to pop together just because you need it to, now that you’ve left the area. I’m afraid I will have to insist, if you want me involved in this.”

  “Couldn’t you go out there for a while?” Margy asked that night as they washed dishes. “Do the research, get it over with? How long could it take?”

  He held a plate up, rinsed it with a quick burst from the tap. Margy preferred the dishwasher, but he had showed her that it wasn’t necessary for two plates. It could be done with just a pint of water, conserving everything.

  “It’s not a question of time.” He held the plate up, let the drops fall back into the pan. Margy took it, dried.

  “But you’d be finished then. You could get a job.” Carefully she polished it, examining the finish on the plate.

  He went back to his typewriter and wrote a new letter, to a professor who had once admired his work. The dissertation was all written and enclosed and all he needed was a signature. Would the professor consider taking over as his adviser at this stage? He mailed the dissertation off again.

  This time while he waited, he gave the apartment a real cleaning. He scrubbed the ceilings, under the refrigerator, back behind the stove, and was appalled at what he found. Old lipstick tubes, lost bow rosin, petrified potatoes from five years ago. How could Margy live like this? She never cleaned. She never even straightened anything. Any room where she had been would have a trail across it, damage of some kind. Pages ripped out of a book or scrawled with ink. She took one bite out of an apple, left the rest to rot. One day he counted six abandoned pairs of shoes from room to room.

  He could hear her in the next room, talking on the phone.

  “He’s full of shit, but he’s adorable,” she said. Webster paused, listening. Who’s full of shit?

  But she just laughed, hung up. When he went into the living room, she was studying a sheaf of music, Tobias Picker, “Invisible Lilacs.”

  “You know, for the two of us to live in this small space, we need to keep it straight,” he said gently.

  She tipped her head back, and her eyes swam with amusement behind the thick lenses.

  “Why, it’s the archangel and his flaming sword. Out, shoes! Out, dust! Go wander the world!”

  “Very funny. But you see what I mean? There won’t be room to breathe in here by spring.”

  Half an hour later, she had not touched the shoes, and it was time for her to leave. Whirling through the apartment, she left swaths of wadded tissue, tennis shoes, damp towels.

  “Can’t talk. See you later. Bye.” She blew him kisses, slammed the door. Seconds later she swept back in to grab the music she had left, swept out again.

  Webster cleaned up, put the shoes away. Walking to the store, he bought organic vegetables for soup, took his run and cleaned. He spent the evening reading about lamprey blight, while he simmered potato peels for broth. He knew what time she would be finished, how long it would take for her to change out of her concert clothes, get to the car, drive home. He chopped celery and onions, sautéed them in olive oil, simmered potatoes in the broth, saving tomatoes, broccoli, and herbs for last. The soup was perfect at the moment when she should walk in.

  The phone rang inst
ead.

  “I’ve got to go to this reception. Sorry, I should have mentioned it. This big swell who funds the symphony. I can’t get out of it. Don’t worry. Calvin will take me.”

  Webster didn’t mind Calvin, the only man alive besides himself who’d ever treated Margy well. True, she was awfully close to Calvin, told him everything and even wore his clothes. It helped that he was gay, and lived in their building, two floors down, so she could ride with him to the symphony at night. At least with Calvin she’d be safe.

  “How late will you be?”

  “I don’t know. Midnight at most. Don’t worry.”

  But she wasn’t home at midnight, and he put the soup away before he fell asleep. Some time that night, he felt her slide between the sheets, smelling of cigar.

  “You smell like the mail,” he murmured and seized her. Who had she been with who had smoked cigars? The spike of jealousy went straight to wanting her.

  She inched away. “Sorry, I’m too beat. Go back to sleep.”

  But he couldn’t stop. Who knew where she had been? He insisted, and she went along, limply. Afterward she fell into a heavy sleep, chin pointed toward the ceiling, lips ajar. Long breaths rattled like waves through gravel, going out.

  He woke before she did and wanted her again. All his protoplasm streamed toward her. Alarmed, she leaped up, filled the tub.

  “I have to take a bath.”

  He followed, stroking her. “Come back to bed.”

  “Can’t. Got to practice. I have no idea what to do with this thing we’re supposed to play today.”

  Quickly she explained about the piece, some brand-new symphony that called for police whistles and bike bells and fog horns. It made demands on violinists she had never seen before. Bathing fast, she rushed out to the living room and started squeezing tortured sounds out of the violin.