by Alex Austin
Tico Reeves felt awkward, could not think of anything to say to the old man, was sorry he had stopped.
They sat there. The salt spray cast its thin net over them. The old man kept staring straight at Tico Reeves, looking him up and down slowly, up and down a dozen times, with these eyes that could have either been burning or dead.
“Here,” the old man said finally, as if it had taken him this time to make an important decision, like a judge who believes that by merely staring into the eyes of the accused he can determine guilt or innocence more truly than any way of reason can. “Here, I’ll show you,” he said. He shifted about clumsily, grunting. But when he was done shifting back and forth, he had not altered his original position by so much as an inch in any direction. “I’ll show you,” he said again. And with this he reached one sand-crusted hand inside his tattered coat and drew out a packet of papers that were tied together with a soiled white string.
The old man set the papers down slowly, carefully on the sand in front of him and with huge fingers he clumsily worked over the string to untie it. It took him several minutes, but when it was undone he groaned softly, then looked up at the young man and let his mouth fall open loosely into what appeared to be what the beginning of smiling must once have been. “I’ll show you,” he said again.
He took one of the papers, opened it with great care and said, “Aaaaaaaaaah!” as he did, nodding, scratching his groin slowly with one hand, leaving it there when he was done. He examined the yellowish paper first himself, saying, “Like this,” as if he had just finished delivering a long speech of instructions to the young man and had concluded heavily with “Like this.” Then he added, “My balls itch. It’s because they’re too big. Makes ’em itch.” He handed the papers over to the young man, and began scratching slowly, cursing quietly, then sniggering to himself, muttering, “Used to scare shit out o’ them little girls. Never seen ’em big, real big before. He-he-he!”
Tico Reeves examined the paper as the old man went on with this for several moments. It took him that long to make out a face on the faded paper. It was the face of a woman. The photograph had been torn out of a newspaper that seemed to be at least thirty or forty years old.
The old man did not wait for Tico Reeves to speak. He handed him another photograph, this one from a magazine (the paper heavier, rougher between his fingers) that was even older than the newspaper. And then he started to hand the young man one picture after the other, making soft animal sounds with each picture as if to describe it in that way.
As Tico Reeves examined the photographs he began to realize that all of them were pictures of actresses of thirty and forty years ago. He recognized a number of them, but did not know their names. When the old man had no more pictures left to give him, Tico Reeves started going over them again, which pleased the old man so he muttered and chuckled and slapped his thighs. This time Tico Reeves recognized Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Marlene Dietrich, and a few more.
When Tico Reeves looked over at the old man, he saw him grinning and nodding slowly.
“My girls,” the old man said. “Sure. You goddam bastard . . .” He snatched the pictures back so suddenly, one of them tore in half (across the eyes), and the old man cried out as if in pain as he snatched the second piece out of Tico Reeves’s hand.
“These here, you bastard, these are my girls, hear?” the old man said, straightening the pictures, flattening them in his lap with the palm of his hand, brushing sand off them with sandy fingers. “I was a young man once, you bastard!” He spit these words out; they would have been the same yellow color of his phlegm if words had any color to them. And then his mouth moved as if making words, but these not only had no color to them, they had no sound either. If Tico Reeves would have seen the old man’s mouth moving this way in silence, seen it on a motion-picture screen, he would have laughed out loud, it looked that comical. But he did not laugh now; he watched. He’d seen country preachers, men who walked dirt roads in their black suits from one mule and wood town to another, looking this same way when they got so worked up over God, they couldn’t even know they looked more in their corrupt passion like what the Devil himself would look like than any messenger of that God they spoke of who was supposed to be all gentleness and all love, who might have looked more like a bird than a man, Tico Reeves often thought, since a bird could fly out of himself what a man had to shout and cry and sometimes even purge from himself with murder or lust or the turning back into himself like a wounded hyena gnawing his own guts, which becomes in man no more than madness, and that was what the old man looked like now, maybe even like that wounded hyena, but with no guts to gnaw.
Then he said, “Sure!” The old man said this. “Why not, huh? You think you’re the one, the fuckin’ only young man who ever was?” He laughed, even the laughter full of rocks, laughed and laughed at this until he began coughing and when the coughing stopped, he continued. “Well, I was a young man . . . sure . . . and these . . . shit . . . they were my girls . . . shit Jesus yes they were!” There was a vague sound to his voice now as if he were repeating words whose meanings he had long ago forgotten. “Every one of ’em,” the old man said. “Sure, you bastard. Shit yes! I fucked every . . . stuck . . . Jesus . . . every one of ’em. Me.” He scratched his groin, the fingers sand-crusted, looking like a knuckle was missing on every one of them. “Shit yes! Me. I did! Every goddam Jesus one of ’em. Stuck ’em. Phipppppp . . . hear?” He made a poking quick obscene thrust into the air with his middle finger, curving it artfully in mid-passage to illustrate what he meant. “Fucked ’em, you bastard, sure . . .” Then with a movement that seemed almost a blow against his own flesh, he shoved the pictures back into his coat and when he did, Tico Reeves saw that all he had on underneath the coat was a torn, unbuttoned pair of woolen trousers and a gray sweatshirt stained in many places like a rag kept under a sink to wipe up whatever falls from plate, pot, hand, or mouth onto the kitchen floor.
The old man was silent a long time except for his loud breathing. He was heavy in the silence, trapped by it, a kind of drowning. His breath smelled like something thoroughly rotted even before it became dead. He was staring down at the bit of sand between his legs, his eyes watery and departed, eyes that had long ago been too thoroughly exposed to all that can be seen for them ever to really see again. Tico Reeves waited for him to go on. He looked past the old man, saw two figures walking into their own shadows toward where he and the old man sat. There was a man and a woman. He could not make out who they were. He wondered if the woman could be the golden-haired girl.
Slowly, Tico Reeves got to his feet and looked off into that distance, trying to shield his eyes with one hand from the sharp glare of sunlight reflected off the green sea.
“Bastard,” the old man muttered. “Shit . . .” He picked up a handful of sand, held it a moment, pressing fingers tight around it as if there was something to be understood only between fingers and sand, no other part of him able to comprehend what his fingers could know in this way and then, as if the sand had withheld its secret from his fingers this time, he threw the sand off wildly to one side, shouting, “Bastard . . . balls . . .” He started throwing handfuls of sand in every direction. Tico Reeves ducked when it came his way, the old man not aiming for him but missing him only by inches.
The old man shouted, “Jesus . . . shit!”
Tico Reeves said, “You just better calm down now, old man.” He spoke not in anger, but to chastise a child who has climbed to a height that, being a child, he cannot know is dangerous. He said, “You just better calm down. . . .”
But he could see, even as the words were coming out of him, that the old man did not, would not hear him. Worlds were between them, worlds as distant as what the bird cries and what the fool man alone in the wood tries to answer. The old man shouted again. Then he laughed, shaking his head. He began hopping along the water’s edge. He made a tremendous effort to lift his legs, but they barely came off the ground, and so his
squat body sank into the helpless motion of the knees, thus creating the illusion he was jumping high into the air simply because the top half of his body moved up and down as his legs would not.
He looked like a bear dancing if bears can become drunk and only then begin their dance. He was dancing, trying to hop off into another world. It looked like that. A savage, ancient place where words had no meaning, where the sun itself did not have any life, where man and dog and God and creatures of the moon all walked on fours through the long dark, sniffing each other to make a beginning of what finally, as a relic of that great first desire, had to become love.
Tico Reeves watched, his eyes fixed on this lunatic clown of an old man. But he walked off quickly as he watched, walking toward the dunes so he would be able to hide behind them in case the man and woman came this far.
The old man, meanwhile, continued throwing handfuls of sand first one way, then the next, and shouting “Balls” up to the sky like a secret word he knew that could make even the old sniffed-at God who had turned his eyes forever from this earth at least listen. He shouted “Balls” as in great anger: Tico Reeves heard it this way. He threw the sand too in this same kind of anger. But as he danced, ambled like a drunken bear down into the waves, the shouting, even the throwing of sand was transformed, became part not of anger in him, but of joy that his own madness had given this language to, like a false translation that eventually becomes the true one, the final meaning, truth turning on itself in this way, myriad, forever incomplete, and on the verge of being laughable.
The old man was playing in the sea like a joyous beast. He shouted to the sea, threw empty handfuls of it, pranced, snarled, laughed up at the sky. The sea knocked him over, a huge wave flopping down on him. His head went under. He rolled a dozen times, arms flailing in baffled panic as the undertow started to drag him out and another wave broke treacherously over his head as if to take it off with a single blow.
Tico Reeves was about to rush out after the old man when he saw him battle back to his feet and stand there in the water, shaking his fist at the sea, shouting, “Bastard . . . you fucko Jesus bastard. . . .” He kept shouting until the shouts again became as screams, then something more than a scream can be because what was behind the sound did not mean screaming, and it became like the joy-light cry of wild sea birds flying across clouds and the sun’s light, and the sea continued to pound in against him, pushing him back up onto the sand, and when he reached the spot where his shells were he sank slowly to the ground, heaving an exhausted, pleasurable sigh, shaking his head, spent, trembling and wrapping both arms around himself, pressing his large eyes shut as his head fell, his chin resting on his chest, and the spittle ran from one corner of his mouth onto his wet, satisfied thighs.
Tico Reeves watched with calm amazed eyes. “Son of a bitch!” he muttered. “Jesus, you son of a bitch!”
two
Miss Smith stood in the kitchen doorway with the shyness of a girl approaching her first party.
Mrs. Orlovski, of course, was the first to see her, and she dropped into the sink two spoons she had in her hand and wiping her hands on her fresh white apron, she went to usher Miss Smith in, exclaiming in a round, thoroughly joyful voice, “Miss Smith, it’s so very good of you to join us.”
Sygen looked over from the pantry where she had gone to get the butter dish out of the huge refrigerator that always reminded her of a pregnant beast.
“Here, here,” Mrs. Orlovski was saying, taking Miss Smith’s arm, “you just come right in and sit down. Everything’s ready.”
Miss Smith looked over at Jean, who was already seated. He had smiled when he had heard her come in, and now she smiled briefly at him, then turned quickly to smile vaguely at Sygen, who came to the table and placed the butter down.
“Perhaps I was very silly to eat all alone in my room,” Miss Smith said.
“Not silly at all,” Mrs. Orlovski was quick to put in. “Why, a person is certainly entitled to their privacy. I’ve always believed that.”
“You’re very kind,” Miss Smith said to Mrs. Orlovski.
“Welcome,” Jean said with the same smile, which Miss Smith immediately returned, her eyes shining with a desperately naïve kind of joy as she sat down opposite him. She said, “Thank you.”
“I’ve made the chicken you like so much,” said Mrs. Orlovski. “And Sygen has made her famous Caesar salad.”
“Mother!” Sygen said softly, by way of embarrassed reproach.
“Your mother is right, Sygen,” Miss Smith said. “Your Caesar salad should be famous. I’ve tasted many Caesar salads, and yours is by far the best.”
Sygen smiled weakly and said, “Thank you,” and felt an unexpected rush of anger flush her cheeks.
“Here, here,” Mrs. Orlovski said as she brought the large red casserole to the table and set it down carefully near her place, where Sygen had piled the plates. “Voila, la cuisine,” she said with a flourish.
Miss Smith laughed and Mrs. Orlovski laughed with her just as soon as she saw that her little joke had been successful; Miss Smith often laughed or smiled for no other reason than to fill a painful vacancy in herself.
Sygen sat down beside Jean and started to unfold her napkin. But Mrs. Orlovski said, “Sygen, you’ve forgotten our very special treat.”
Sygen seemed puzzled a moment as Mrs. Orlovski continued to stare, smiling, at her and then she remembered and went to the pantry to fetch the bottle of rosé wine her mother had put on ice three hours ago. When she set the bottle down on the table, Mrs. Orlovski turned to Miss Smith and said, “I’ve always been a great believer in the French manner of dining. They seem to make such an important affair out of every meal, and that’s how I think it should be, don’t you?”
“Always,” Miss Smith said.
“The French are famous for making snobs out of Americans,” Jean said, glancing over at Miss Smith. He said it lightly, but his mother frowned and said, “Now Jean, you just stop that kind of talk. You know very well that’s not true.” Turning to Miss Smith, she added, “Jean always has to play his little joke.”
They were silent as Mrs. Orlovski served them. When she was finished and all the plates had been passed around, she put the cover on the casserole and, lifting her fork, said, “Now there’s plenty more in the pot, so nobody be shy.”
As soon as Miss Smith had tasted the first bite, she said, “It’s absolutely delicious.”
Mrs. Orlovski was greatly pleased and said, “You’re very kind.”
And then as soon as Miss Smith had tasted the salad, she turned to Sygen and said, “It definitely is a famous salad.”
But all Sygen said was, “I got the recipe for it out of the Sunday paper.”
“Well, there’s a lot you’ve added to it, dear,” Mrs. Orlovski said. “She really has,” she added to Miss Smith.
Sygen continued eating and did not bother to reply.
They ate for a while in silence. Mrs. Orlovski looked over at Miss Smith from time to time almost as if she expected to see her having trouble in handling her knife and fork and was ready to come to her aid. Miss Smith kept her eyes on her plate, and Jean glanced up in her direction. Sygen saw him doing this and sighed once in a way that rather surprised her mother, but this was no time to speak of such things and so Mrs. Orlovski just continued eating.
The silence was broken by Jean saying, “You’ve forgotten to open the wine.”
And Mrs. Orlovski dropped her fork into her plate, placing one hand to her breast, and she said, “Oh dear yes!”
Jean said, “Here, give it to me.”
Sygen handed him the bottle and the brass opener. Miss Smith looked up, surprised to see the ease with which he handled the operation.
When the bottle was opened, Sygen took it from him, handed it to her mother, and Mrs. Orlovski, as she poured just a drop in the first glass, then moving on to the second, said, “Wine brings out so much in the flavor of the food, you know.”
She passed the glasses a
round, keeping the first one for herself and only as she lifted it to make a toast did she realize she had forgotten to pour any more wine in it after those first few drops.
When her glass was properly filled, she raised it again and said, “Miss Smith, I hope you don’t mind my making this first toast to you, our dear guest.”
Miss Smith smiled shyly, as awkwardly as a young girl; she could always feel, for a brief time, a renewal of hope when she was in the company of strangers, simply because they had no way of knowing all that she once might have wanted and had never found and this toast seemed to have broken through that thin shell to make her known to these people with whom she was now sitting. She glanced over at Jean as if she wanted him to tell her with some expression that he understood she did not want any such attention to be drawn to herself.
Sygen and Jean lifted their glasses, and they all drank to Miss Smith.
Miss Smith then lifted her own glass and said, “To the most wonderful family I have ever known.”
“Oh dear now,” said Mrs. Orlovski, blushing extravagantly.
Miss Smith drank.
Sygen looked at Jean.
“Miss Smith,” Mrs. Orlovski said, as they all started eating again, “I can’t begin to tell you how pleasant it is to have you with us. You’re so different from the summer guests, you know. Oh yes. So very different. Why some of the things I could tell you about what goes on here during the summer . . .”
“Mother!” Sygen said by way of reproach.
“I’m sure Miss Smith would be interested in hearing about our summer guests, wouldn’t you?” Mrs. Orlovski asked, turning to her guest.
Miss Smith said, “Yes. Yes, of course.”
And Mrs. Orlovski turned to Sygen and said, “There now. Just because you may have heard some of these stories doesn’t mean they might not be interesting to someone else.”