by Steve Almond
He met her through a mutual friend and now she is in his home and he is cooking for her, chopping mushrooms and boiling water for pasta, washing the cupboard dust off his wineglasses. He has learned to cook a few meals from TV chefs and knit these into the tight circle of his life. His business—consulting—sucks him through airports and phones and flights and conferences and beepers and burgers and sour suits and occasionally he suspects he is missing something. Not daughters or wives or azaleas, but the sense of his body as experienced against another. Night illuminates this need, tenders it, demands a dividend.
This woman in his apartment, she is—what? A nurse or a stenographer. A piano teacher. She exhibits patience worthy of a bygone era. He sees her traveling the Oregon Trail in a long plain dress, mending things. Her fingers are strong, able-looking. There is something steadying just in the way she holds her chardonnay, cupped in both hands. She leans against the fridge carefully. Her eyes seem to want to dip beneath the surface of his words, toward more telling information.
She is not someone he thinks of as pretty. There are flaws, which his life surrounded by advertising draws out, distorts. Slight underbite. Flat bottom. Saggy arms. The defects are not small. But then, there is him. Sometimes, before bed, he catches sight of himself in the bathroom mirror and sees his father.
They are here because he invited her. Night fell around him, his first one home after a cross-country trip, and something in the yellowing of the streetlamps outside his building left him bereft. He remembered his friend pressing this woman’s number onto him, how he had avoided calling her, thinking: she must be desperate. When he finally got her on the phone, two nights later, he was the one who felt desperate, trying to play the idea off as an impulse.
He continues to chop and she pours herself more wine and moves around his apartment, inspecting. He knows about her: she has been married before, she has a child who is away for the week, she is the same age he is. He knows about her. She glances at his stack of unopened mail, as if she would like to sort through it, as if she doesn’t quite trust him to separate the junk from the significant.
He puts the knife down and tilts up his wine, stopping when he feels a slight burn against his gums. He slips out of his shoes and approaches her from behind and her neck is there, warm. He knows this could happen only from behind, that he is sneaking up on himself as much as her. He closes his eyes and hopes.
Or a wedding. Sure. Why not? They still hold them. Big distracted churchy affairs glittering with pearls or earnest runty ones on damp lawns. The nudnik photographer, the sweaty caterers, weeping mothers and black sheep beckoned back, the bow-tied band and the bride and groom helpless with goodwill. It still goes on in all these places, San Leandro and Mount Kisco and Wallingford, and, at the fringe of it, behind the rectory or out near the pool, a bridesmaid stares ardently at a groomsman. They have had much to drink, as weddings recommend.
She is so proud of her friend, she says, and the groomsman agrees. It is something to be proud of. She is so beautiful. Yes. Never seen her so radiant. Yes. Beautiful. And him, too. He didn’t look so tall in the photos. How tall is he? Six-foot-three. Wow.
He is thinking about the bachelor party, about the stripper called Danielle, between whose breasts his nose spent a brief and thrilling span, shocked at the scent (shoe leather and cinnamon) and the firmness of whatever held them aloft. This moony bridesmaid—with her wedge of a face and colored contacts, her peach chiffon dress and matching pumps—she is no Danielle. She is a creature in sad real time. Her nakedness cannot be anything men would pay to see, though men, if protected by payment, will look at almost anything.
And anyway, she is here before him, full of crab ravioli and champagne, swallowing back burps and twisting her bangs between her fingers. She hasn’t the will to execute the pass. She can only display her markings, touch her body in ways that might induce in him a mimetic response.
He is at his leisure to consider this, to ease back on his ankles and assess the pros and cons. She is homely; there is that. Yet her homeliness weighs on him favorably, accents his moderate beauty. This is a wedding and there is drink and hopes run deep on such occasions, but not so expectations. All pageantry inspires fantasy, no matter how shabby. And besides, she is wearing these prim peach pumps, shoes that will never be used again, which almost demand to be torn off, bitten at in mock depravity.
He is not certain about kissing, though, not just yet. And so he lowers his hand down the front of her dress and lifts her breast so that it puddles on his palm and so that he can hear his name on her tongue.
In every life, such deciding places must be reached. Especially in this era of frantic indecision, with its impatient sun and hammering moon, with its pathological ulteriority, when it seems a wonder that two people might ever agree to anything like terms. Day after fallen day, these odd delicious moments on which so much depends; unwrapped like papered pears, held close to nose, sniffed, tasted.
In the downtown bar, where Bill or Mike or Chuck has pinned his hopes on the sleeve of Rachel, Liz, Michele: a failure he could not have foreseen. (For if he had, why should he have invited her here and spent his money and time and dwindling predator energy?) She looks at his hand on her arm and smiles politely. She sighs, and in her sigh invokes the nearest cliché: nothing personal a bad time still recovering just met someone.
He envisions her dressed as Salome, the dance of her veils. If this were physical trauma, the endorphins would come sloshing in to spare him. He would not hear the chant of looming humiliation, or feel suffused by brittle hate for this woman, who is no longer a woman, only something he will never have. The electricity in his arm, with which he hoped to jolt her into panting collaboration, shuts down. The bartender freezes. The skyscrapers go dark. The set is struck.
* * *
The airport pair have no such trouble. The airlines, after all, have arranged passage to a nearby hotel. Inside his room, the man who looks like a gangster shucks his suit, steps into the shower, pleased at the water’s scalding pulse, emerging pink, soapy. On his bed: the woman who missed her flight to Denver. She is in towels, one around her chest, one twirled on her head. Older with her makeup scrubbed, her flesh unbundled. Nothing like Ingrid Bergman, with her slender white nose and her shadows. Nothing like his wife for that matter, who drinks protein shakes and runs half-marathons. Nothing like anyone he could have ever seen himself lying beside in a hotel room near the airport. And for this reason, an object of intense fascination to his body, which responds along predictable lines. They are not graceful, or pretty. He lunges, she groans. They press together. The entire project fills no more than a few minutes. But when he reaches for one of her cast-away towels she grabs his wrist. “Wait,” she says. “I like to let it dry.”
This, more than anything, more than his refusal to bestow upon her a goodnight kiss, more than his stiff retreat from her mouth, more than the silent next-morning shuttle ride, will haunt him. He has always worried that he looks like a thug, ever since his nose was broken by a bully in high school. The sight of his ejaculate spattered on her belly jolts loose a memory, this bully staring hard at a pornographic photo in a mildewy gym, now thirty years ago, announcing: That broad is a waste of good sperm.
And what of Geoff, at the center of the warm suburban home unspooling his patter to Elena, who looks like a Modigliani? He too has misjudged. And he too will suffer a mortification, though not of the flesh. He reaches for her ankle and she pulls away and his chest stumbles. She stands quickly and moves to join her boyfriend in the kitchen. Soon it will be announced to those assembled that the couple are engaged. And still later he will see the two of them outside, nuzzling against a car.
Closer to morning, with his own girlfriend curled away from him, Geoff will see things as they are: that he coveted Elena’s innocence not as a thing to defile but as a remedy. Beneath the fantasy of ravaging her was the fantasy that she would rescue him, stroke his brow and somehow cure him of his tired contempt for everythi
ng. With her, he might have become the sort of man who desires purely, rather than the sort who seeks betrayal at the center of a foolish party. He will never feel quite sure of himself again.
The old torch singer is surprised and pleased by the presence of two young American soldiers. She dispatches the proprietor of the club to invite them backstage: the madame would like to say hello after she has changed. PFC Shane and his companion are led to a small room with a single old love seat. The light is soft, roseate. There is the pleasant, cherryish smell of pipe tobacco. Their thighs brush.
But now Shane wonders if this might not be an elaborate setup. He has heard tell of such things, MPs descending with billy clubs. Then, too, there is the ambiguity of his new friend’s responses: a fluttery hug in the shadows, that lopsided grin, which could mean anything. When you are a soldier like PFC Shane, you learn to love quickly, to grasp and gulp and be done with it. Besides, there is the curfew to be considered.
Now the diva makes her appearance, shorter than she seemed on the bar, modestly wrapped in a chenille robe. French cigarettes in a silver case. A cocktail in a tall goblet. She lived for a number of years in Houston, Texas. Do they know the place? An oil baron kept her as his mistress. All quite scandalous. She was terribly lonely in her glass and marble flat on Carr Street, like a princess in her tower. This awl baron—her imitation makes them giggle—used to come and pounce on her. Fat and hairy as a woodchuck, with a prick like a jackass. When you are young, she says, it all seems enough. But love is the most important thing of all, don’t you agree? How old are you boys? Really, that young? Well it’s time you learned the first rule of love: Never hide. Love must be acknowledged by the touch of days. And here she makes her exit, leaving them her dressing room and the time to decide for themselves.
What a trip, Shane says.
Yeah, says his new friend. Pretty amazing. The boy’s arm falls across Shane’s shoulders. His mouth is a wet red arrow.
Yeah.
The consultant has placed his lips to her neck and she has responded with the consent of her body, turning against him, lifting her face. She is there and ready. But now he is unsure. The pass sits wrong with him, plunging dread where the flutter should be. All he can imagine is the moment after physical release, when the soul, the patient soul, reasserts sovereignty. This is the war that never ends: the body’s simple needs set against the soul’s byzantine wants, each accusing the other of insufficient grace.
No. No pass should suffer such sad scrutiny. She senses the slackening of his muscles and slumps onto the couch. It is called a pass because there is a movement of one desire past another. But the desires of this couple sit still as stone and stare down on both of them and the best they can manage is a kind of dour truce.
We should do this again, the consultant says.
Sure, the piano teacher says. I’d like that.
There is a long pause. He doesn’t know what to do with this. In his off-site seminars they tell him to attack the lulls, tell a joke, make a comment about the weather. But listening to the sad uncertain timbre of her voice ruins his focus.
Anyway, he says.
Right, she says. Sure.
The young couple at the wedding, the bridesmaid and the groomsman, they have no such difficulties. Not yet. For the moment, they are tongues and tails and hips and hands. The arm of night lowers itself over the rectory, turns the swimming pool into a small blue jewel. They have pressed themselves against the side of a building, tumbled into the shallow end, staggered to the nearest flat surface; her peach chiffon dress is bunched around her thighs, his rented gray suit has split down the middle.
The body, the body, the body. And the dizzy players that spin across this smooth field. They are all of them to be applauded. Nights are long. An entire lifetime of long. And the pass, here, now, a merciful lantern which lights the way, softly dims, and drags us toward dream.
Moscow
She told him: “I am completely naked.”
These were the first words she spoke and they tumbled from her mouth, beautifully shaped, smoothed by an accent which sounded French, but was from farther east, Moscow, so that what he heard was: Ah im compledly neggid. Her voice rose slightly, placed emphasis on the third word, as if her nakedness were a gift meant entirely for him, presented without forethought, without the least awareness of the rougher ends to which such declarations can be put.
They were on a thin, hissing phone line. She might have been speaking from fifty years ago. He closed his eyes. And as he did, she slipped into a new kind of nakedness, a nakedness untainted by the body’s awful math, restored to classical grace. He saw white breasts, plucked from the white of her chest, her high bottom, the soft furrows of her rib cage. He saw her on tiptoe. He saw her lips make the words in wide, red bands.
He understood that what she said was not intended as titillation, even coy provocation. It was merely a happy coincidence. The phone rang and, in her urgent hope that it be him, she picked the receiver up, forgetting to cover herself, forgetting that she stood, in her apartment, in Moscow, without a stitch of clothing. It was an act of forgetting, then. And her statement to him, an act of delighted remembrance.
He desired in her this wondrous capacity, no hint of which she had shown him previously, that she would someday grow so accustomed to him, so unembarrassed by her own physicality, that she would forget, and then remember, her own nakedness, that just such a cycle might mark their days together. Hearing her words, he felt transported above shame, above lust and privation. If the moment could be clung to, sustained like a perfect note. Perhaps Moscow was such a place. Perhaps there, such possibilities existed.
He had never visited, had only seen photos: grim, towering statues, wide streets, open squares, and, on the horizon, church spires of the oddest shape, like clumps of wet chocolate drawn to a point. Perhaps Moscow was banked in snow, and perhaps the heat of her pale body, standing beside a window, caused the pane to fog.
But even as this image formed, a second image took shape, of him below her window, outside, staring up. And here, from this vantage point, she grew blurry, obscured not by some trick of condensation, or light or distance, but his own insistent longing.
Hardly any time had passed since she spoke, but now he could not see her at all, not as she had existed before. He felt the hard knock of need, stiffened against himself. He might have reached out, tried to explain to her what was happening, but he didn’t understand himself. A singular vision of love was perfecting itself in the singular shape of her. And yet that shape, by its very recognition, was now receding, dissolving, and reemerging as something else, a myth of his own illusive want, a creature with a thatch of glistening pubic hair, a crude mouth, nipples the color of bruises.
Years later he toured the factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It was late and he was the only visitor, and the guide—a young woman in a severe suit—walked him briskly through each cavernous room. Workers in surgical scrubs scurried to and fro. Steel machines hissed and banged and choked. He watched one dip down and release through invisible apertures a thousand coins of chocolate, then pull away so violently as to bring these to a sharp, liquid point. The process was repeated time and again, a mass production of the inimitable, which seemed to him, in that moment, terribly wrong.
He hadn’t loved her in the beginning. He was sure of that. He may never have loved her for more than that one, long-ago moment.
But now, as he watched the spires of Moscow reproduced in miniature, as the guide hustled him along toward a bin with free chocolates, urging him to select one-just-one-now-is-the-moment-sir-please, coldly appraising his dazed expression; now, as he staggered toward the bin and obediently removed a piece, as he exited into the frigid parking lot, as he tore at the foil, as the chocolate fell into his mouth through a puff of steamy breath and began at once to seep away; now he recognized that he would never rid himself of the moment. It was insoluble.
He had suffered, without a doubt, one perfect memory which, thou
gh misplaced, had never been forgotten. It lived inside him and would continue to do so for the rest of his life, to be reawakened again and again. And so he got into his car and drove on the turn-pike and exited and turned into a field and stopped the car and stepped outside and removed each piece of his clothing and lay down in the banked snow and waited for Moscow—the cold lips of that distant city—to brush his skin.
Valentino
We were at this party, was the situation. Holden was holding forth on his theory of beauty gradients. “You can’t get out of your depth aesthetically,” he said. “You do that and you’re done for.”
“I’ve heard this before,” I said. “I know all this.”
“All men and women are divided along aesthetic lines, see. That’s just the way it is. There’s maybe twenty, twenty-two such strata. At the top you’ve got the movie stars and models, okay? Tom Cruise and that skinny bitch he’s married to, all those fuckers. Then the soap stars and TV anchors. Then commercial actors, then actual nontelevised attractive people, down to the average, sort of ugly, and at the bottom the real sad cases, cleft palates and the like.”
“Right.” I watched Astrid Miller make her way toward the keg.
“The trick here is that every person recognizes intuitively where they belong on the beauty gradient. This is the first thing you gauge when you walk into a room. Right? It’s like: ‘Okay, better than him, worse than him, way better than him.’ That’s how people know who they’re supposed to end up with. It’s like that song about Noah: The animals, they came on, they came on in twosies, twosies.”
“Wait a sec,” I said. “That’s about species. Species of animals.”
Holden tapped his temple. “That’s what they tell you it’s about, man. That song’s about who gets fucked by who. That’s what that whole thing is about.”