Angels Go Naked

by Cornelia Nixon

  She had four shows that week and stayed out late after each one. Receptions, galas, fund-raisers, she said. Webster waited up and sniffed her over carefully. She smelled like cigarettes, champagne, blue cheese, sushi, strange perfumes, and concert sweat. One night she smelled like burnt sugar and said it was a dessert soaked in brandy, set on fire. None of it put him off. The pressure built up as he waited hours for her, wondered where she was. He couldn’t help it. He extracted tolls from her, every night and in the morning too.

  “Twice a day is too much,” she gasped finally one morning as she shrank away.

  He could barely speak, he wanted her so much.

  “It wasn’t last summer.”

  “I was on vacation then. Now I have other things to do. I’m exhausted all the time.”

  “You wouldn’t be if you came home at night.”

  He whimpered, stroking her. She gave in, stayed in bed with him.

  On Sunday night that week she had agreed to play a benefit for Haitian refugees, and afterward she called to say there was a party and she’d better go.

  “No,” Webster said, the word out of his mouth before he noticed it. Come home and take a bath with me, was what he meant, but he couldn’t organize his tongue.

  There was a silence on the phone.

  “No?” Her laugh came light and musical. “Is that really what you said? Look, you know you could come down and go with us. I’ll get you a tux, and you can come along and help to chat up donors any time you like. How does that sound?”

  She knew he’d planned his life to avoid such events. Even for their wedding he had made it clear there’d be no family, no guests, and no reception line. So now all he could do was demand when she would be home, though she’d ignore it if she wanted to.

  At midnight, he shoved a window up and watched the cars six floors below. Pacing between the window and the stairs, he kept an eye on Calvin’s door. He couldn’t read. He was too anxious to sit down. How did he get into this state? He’d lived alone for years, liked it. What was happening to him?

  He lay on the couch and didn’t know he was asleep until he woke up with a start. It was after two, and Margy wasn’t home. Leaning out into the cool night air, he checked the block but couldn’t see the old Mercedes anywhere.

  After a while, it drove up, idled in the street. There were no spaces left, but Margy wedged it in by a hydrant, where the ticket would be worth a week of groceries. He heard her laugh as she and Calvin stepped out of the car.

  Suddenly, he didn’t want to talk to her. Switching off the lights, he shed his clothes and slid under the comforter, lay like a dead man.

  She tiptoed past him, closed the bathroom door. Humming on the other side, she filled the tub. Her buttons clicked on the tile floor. Soap smells drifted out with whiffs of steam and water rippling. He was almost actually asleep when she slid in next to him and ran her tongue along his spine. His body woke up all the way at once, but he resisted it.

  “What?” she whispered, lips against his ear from behind. “What do you want? Isn’t this it?”

  Not only this, he could have said, but then she might have stopped. Sighing, he rolled over, took her wrists. His fingers overlapped, encircled them. Small bones, flexible. He could have snapped them with one flick, but what would that get him? Her breath came quick against his neck. When she tried to pull away and look at him, he clamped his cheek against her ear and held it there, safe from her eyes.

  His dissertation came back from the new professor he had sent it to. The man said he would like to help, but he had talked to Webster’s old adviser, and they had discussed it with the whole group in marine biology. The group decided Webster should come back to Berkeley and do more research. If he didn’t, they agreed there was no way they could grant him a degree.

  Climbing the stairs from the mailbox, Webster considered flying out to burn down the biology building. As he walked into the apartment, it looked different to him. His field notes on Aurelia were still attached to every wall. What was he thinking, leaving them up everywhere? Yank, he ripped them down along the hall. Yank, yank, yank, he reached the dining room.

  It was a Saturday, and Margy had a rare day off. In the kitchen, she made salad, humming. Reaching for a page of notes, he saw her tear a paper towel off the roll. Fascinated, he watched while she dried one lettuce leaf and tossed the towel into the trash. She did it twice, three times. When she reached for a fourth, he raced into the kitchen, and his hand shot out to stop the roll.

  “Paper towels are trees. At least use it again. Or this,” he said and offered her a linen towel, one of ten some friend of hers had given them when they got married, just three full moons ago.

  She flinched. “You dry your hands on that, and you expect me to use it on something we’re going to eat?”

  He glanced at his hands involuntarily. “Do you think everything you eat is sterilized? There are about a million germs inside your mouth right now. Not to mention on your skin, your eyelashes, under your nails . . . ”

  He didn’t know where to begin. Creatures too small to see lived all over her, most of them not hurting anything. Mitochondria inside her cells, lactobacilli that helped digest her food. Three hundred million of his sperm thrashed happily inside her after every single time.

  She shuddered, opened the refrigerator. “My, you think such lovely things. I’ve always wondered what goes on inside your head. Is it all just jellyfish and germs in people’s mouths? Or do you ever think about the people you know, what they’re like and what they say to you? And music, things like that?”

  He had once been drawn to crab development, before he noticed shrimp. But he didn’t feel like saying that. In fact, he didn’t feel like saying anything. He watched her take a small container out and set it on the counter. He picked it up. Pot au crème, it said. Crème fraiche. How many times had he asked her not to buy plastic they’d have to throw away? For centuries, millennia, this little pot would stay intact, long after Margy herself rotted into compost, dried to dust, rejoined the atmosphere as a carbon cloud.

  “Why did you buy this?”

  She glanced up, focused on his hand. “What? Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

  She tried to take the pot. A wave of fury blinded him. His fist convulsed, the cap popped up. A dome of white cream crested out like pus.

  “What are you doing?” She snatched it away from him.

  He stalked out of the room, feeling as if he might explode. Was it because he would not get a Ph.D. from Berkeley? No, it was Margy and the cream container. He felt insane.

  “We’ll use it again,” she called from the kitchen cheerfully.

  He wasn’t listening. Putting on running shorts, he shoved his feet into moccasins and tied his hair back with a leather thong. He needed to get out of here. He had to think. Strapping a small blue nylon pack with sample jars around his naked waist, he burst out the front door and thundered down the stairs.

  It was November now, but strangely warm, and half the city had turned out along the breakwater with bicycles and strollers, dogs and children, several thousand barbecues. The air was mainly charcoal smoke, flavored with lighter fluid, car exhaust, and sauerkraut from hot dog stands. Near Oak Street Beach, one man was barbecuing in his car. The metal dish lay on the floor of his front seat, and flames shot up around the dash, while the guy, a heavy, white-skinned blond about nineteen, clutched a baby to his naked chest and shoved the meat around.

  Webster escaped onto the clanking metal bridge that crossed the river to the south and fought through strolling crowds again, never quite reaching his stride. At last he arrived at the aquarium, the planetarium, the landing strip for private planes. Asphalt shimmered in the heat, and he ran across it fast to reach the farthest dike. No Swimming, No Diving, a sign said on the chain-link fence. Beyond it, water glinted through the haze, green and pearl-pink where a swell shifted.

  Three black men squatted by a cooler on the dike, near the only opening along the fence. One of them was tall
and lean in cut-off jeans, and he stood up and glared as Webster approached. Webster didn’t slow. As he passed them on the narrow cement strip, he gave a nod and loped to the far end.

  Stepping from his moccasins, he unstrapped the pack and took a sample jar, dove in. Tepid, cooler underneath, the water smelled faintly of burning rubber and felt soapy as it slid across his skin.

  He swam a few minutes and turned to see how far he’d gone. Treading, checking with his feet for dead cars, old refrigerators, bodies anchored in cement, he noticed that the tall black man was running down the dike. He threw both arms into the air, yelling something Webster couldn’t quite make out. He picked up Webster’s pack and flung it out into the lake.

  “Hey!” Webster yelled.

  The moccasins went next. Suddenly the man was close enough to hear. He roared.

  “How’d you like me to fuck you in the ass?”

  Webster paused only a moment, then swam back fast. The moccasins were floating, but the pack was gone. There was no question now of getting back onto the dike, with the guy leaping, foaming at the mouth. He had his shirt off, and his body jerked, sweat flying off him. His eyes bulged red, his face contorted with the yelling mouth.

  “How’d you like me to fuck you in the ass?”

  Clutching his moccasins and one remaining sample jar, he looked fast for another way to haul back out. The guy leaped in and started swimming after him, still yelling as he swam.

  “How’d you like me to fuck you in the ass?”

  It was a long swim all the way around the point, and he ran into an oil slick at the harbor mouth. But the guy fell back, and Webster managed to haul out and run into the crowd without seeing him. He was acutely conscious of his bare skin, wet with lake water and oil and sweat. His knees shook. Did the guy think he was gay, or possibly female? People stared. He felt exposed, as if he had been shitting in public. Ashamed, he tried to run and almost couldn’t move.

  At last he got to their building, but didn’t want to go up the front stairs, where he might see someone he knew. Unlocking the back gate, he quickly climbed the old, wood fire escape, trying to get out of sight.

  A sound came down to meet him, caught him unaware. The violin, played huge. It was the goddamned sweet-sad tune. He had to sit down on the stairs and put his head between his knees. It took hold of him, stroked him where he couldn’t reach. Swollen like a bruise, he waited to split open, bleed.

  Flight

  One summer in Missouri woods, before the sun could boil the air, a small bird darted low from thick green vines, and, unable to stop, Webster’s size-twelve running shoe came down on it. He was on the side of life. When he took plankton samples from farm ponds, he tried to let them go unhurt. Bugs lived undisturbed around his house. He tried not to eat meat. Dropping to his knees, he picked up the bird, a chickadee, delicate white windpipe popped through the chest wall like a rubber band. A minute before, it had flitted through the trees, loopy as a butterfly, calling cheerfully. Now it was limp, like a water balloon, only too small—more like a used condom. He felt an anxious flash. What was his wife doing, that minute, in Chicago?

  It was an ancient, stupid thought, whispered by the sloth-brain at the bottom of his skull. There had been that bastard in New York, five years ago. She said she didn’t fuck him, but who knew? Okay, they weren’t married then, and now they were. Didn’t that mean she wouldn’t do it now? He put it from his mind and poked the windpipe back inside the chickadee, though it would never breathe again.

  He had deaths already on his head. In school he had dissected frogs, later fetal pigs shot full of plastic goo, pink in their arteries and blue for veins, plus countless starfish, octopods, crustaceans, clams. He tried to stick to projects that had been designed to help some creature in decline. But the day always arrived when you had to cut the animal you were trying to save. He was now a grad student in lake biology, and to pay tuition, buy his books, he worked for a project on amphibians, why they laid fewer eggs the last few years, or eggs that didn’t hatch, around the world. He wanted them to hatch, but every day he tried to make them stop, zapped frog eggs with fertilizer, pesticide, or ultraviolet rays. Brain surgeons learned to operate on cats. Dental students practiced cutting gums on live monkeys. You could specialize in the tiniest, most loathsome viruses and find yourself injecting them into baby bunnies to find out what they did.

  He laid the chickadee on a tree limb, in case somehow it could wake up, and walked back to his campsite, in a glade by a sinkhole. He couldn’t shake off the anxiety. The glade was full of black-eyed susans, bachelor buttons, and pink yarrow, and his Harley’d scored a trench through them. What had he accomplished, besides crushing flowers, birds? He’d been away from home almost a week, taken samples out of forty-seven ponds, most of them full of nitrates, PCBs, and chloridane, nothing that moved. The ponds were all just belly up, with X’s on their eyes. There were another eighteen he should check. But what would happen if he went home instead and saw his wife?

  He knew what Margy would be doing now. She’d be asleep, alone. The orchestra was playing in Ravinia, and soon she would get up to practice, standing in the living room, barefoot in shorts if it was warm. She might play nothing but one phrase a hundred times. When he was home, he liked to loiter near her, watch the muscles twitch in her thin arms, fingers oscillating on the strings like hummingbird wings. Sometimes he stood behind her, pressed against her while she played, let the music vibrate in his bones. It was almost as good as sex, depending on the piece (alas, it was all true, “Bolero” was the best). He followed her through the apartment, anxious if she went into the bathroom and closed the door. Was she all right in there? She wasn’t making any noise. Once when she had ordinary flu, she fainted while talking on the phone. She had been sitting sideways on a chair, and when she fell back, her head bounced half an inch above the floor. At night she had bad dreams. Sometimes she sat up and gave a rasping shriek as if her tongue had been removed: “Unnnnnnh! Unnnnnnnh!”

  It was a big tube coming in the window, she would say, or a crevasse that opened underneath the bed. Once when he woke up, she was leaning out the window, six floors off the ground.

  “We have to!” she yelped when he grabbed her.

  “We have to what?”

  Lights came on in her eyes. She couldn’t remember.

  She went to see a shrink, spent expensive hours discussing it. The shrink did not suggest she take a long vacation from the symphony. The shrink wanted to talk about Webster. Margy came home looking thoughtful.

  “Did your parents abuse you?” she asked him casually. And, “Oh, by the way, when are you going to finish your degree, so we can have a child?”

  Webster had almost finished his degree. He had in fact done two doctorates, the one at Berkeley and the one in Chicago on lakes, though he had not quite been awarded either. Nine years was perhaps too long to be a grad student, especially in science. But when he got things worked out in the lab, designed the right computer model for his work, refined the data, who knew what might happen? He could get both of them!

  But that didn’t mean he knew what their next step would be. Margy claimed he had said yes to children in the murky past, on the Pacific coast, where you could walk for miles and not see others of your kind. In Chicago, though, they lived with millions of their kind in the space of a small atoll, surrounded by each other’s trash. He checked water drops that ought to teem with plankton and found them quite free of life. Was it really, logically, a human baby that was needed here?

  He tried to joke. “Maybe when you get me out of Chicago.”

  She didn’t laugh. “Sometimes I wonder if you could have filed your dissertation a long time ago.”

  “If only that were true,” he said, and happily explained how freshwater plankton differed from their ocean counterparts, in ways that affected their population variance. She listened, sticking out her lower lip. Her face began to look like a small bulldozer.

  “And that’s the only reason? You r
eally haven’t finished it?”

  Often she’d explained to him the right age for a woman to have her first baby (twenty-four), and pointed out how far she had exceeded it (nine years). She never mentioned her abortion, fifteen years ago. But the big tube in her dreams cut like a knife and tried to suck her up. The shrink was probably quite interested. But did that really, logically, have anything to do with him?

  “You know what I’ve noticed lately?” she said. “You don’t even kiss me like you mean it.”

  Webster stopped midstep. He had been on his way back to a chapter on the reproductive habits of freshwater snails.

  “Like I mean it? Of course I mean it. What are you talking about?”

  “Did you ever see that old commercial on TV, when we were kids? Bucky Beaver for Ipana, how it coats your teeth with this—knock, knock—invisible shield?” Making a fist, she knocked the air beside his chest. “It’s like you’ve got this—knock, knock—invisible shield.”

  Webster smiled. “In bed, you mean. It’s like I’m under glass in bed.”

  She gave a breathless shrug. “Sort of.”

  That night, he couldn’t sleep, read late, and she had been asleep for hours when he finally slid between the sheets. She sat up in the dark.

  “Unnnnnnh! Unnnnnnnh!” she shrieked, rasping.

  He woke her up. “It’s me. What did you think?”

  “It was a hell-dog with huge dripping jaws. A hell-dog getting into bed with me!”

  In his camp by the sinkhole, he packed his gear onto the bike and rolled out of the glade, trying to stay in the same rut he had already made. Driving dirt tracks, country roads, and freeways, skin encased in grime, sweat, motor oil, he reached the south end of Lake Michigan, where clouds of black smoke huffed from steel mills, and flames flickered in the gloom, while miles of pipe snaked over ground that could ignite if someone threw a match. The National Sacrifice Zone, as the EPA called it, meaning they could not protect this place at all. It included Chicago, where the only wildlife was the many million rats that lived on dog feces. Beside it all, green and tantalizing to the sky, gleamed the dead lake. On the Southside, his tires thumped over potholes like heartbeats. Passing the Loop, the near Northside, he turned off at Lincoln Park, drove to his own block, and left the bike. Adrenaline zapped at his heart, like a frog’s tongue at a fly. Bounding up the stairs, he flung his door wide, walked from room to room.