And D had absorbed her. Of course he wanted to keep her with him.
That very day, he had his first dream.
Exhausted after his discovery, he had returned to the embassy in the late afternoon. Unable to face his office, he diverted his steps from the front walk toward the deserted path on the grounds where no one ever seemed to stroll. He walked deeper into the woods. The path sloped into a shaded dimple in the earth.
It was dusk in the dell.
D heard the drone of insect wings. In the mottled light a dragonfly dove straight down. Up curved a damselfly.
Impulsively D lay down in the leaves in his three-piece suit and curled up like a praying divine, two hands under his chin. He felt himself melting a little. All the old bedevilments dispersed into a delicate dampness. The world softened from darkling to darling …
… A stately antlered stag appeared in the distance and slowly, with a calm command, walked closer until D could see that he wore a diamond necklace around his neck. The stag slowly bowed his head, doffed his entire rack of antlers, and raised his head up again, looking directly at D.
Now the deer was a doe! The doe blinked her eyes at D, as if waking. Then she donned the antlers, and turned and walked away …
D woke up ravenously hungry—and overjoyed.
He dusted himself off and drove straight to dinner. As he stared out the restaurant window, eating his dumplings, he wondered if responsibilities really do begin in dreams.
Maybe dreams are responsible to us, he thought.
He felt his sister inside him. She was the reason he was a debonair man, a man who understood that everything has two sides: inner/outer, yes/no. D thought both in lines as sharp as the creases in trousers, and in curves like the swirls of a skirt.
What do I really know? he asked himself. Only that he had woken strangely endeared to himself—and satisfied. Now he understood the necessity of delay. To wait, and then to discover. Never to have only one answer.
The napkin at the restaurant had come rolled inside a little sparkly ring. “Add this to my bill,” he said to the waiter. And pocketed the little diadem as a reminder of the dyad he was.
E’s Encyclopedia of Emotions
“What endeavor entices you?” E’s family asked when she was very young. The queries from her uncle and her grandma and her first and second cousins, not to mention her parents, her siblings and great-grandpa, made her spin like a pinball in confusion. Eeeek!
But the rest of the e family all rolled calmly about their business in their enormous house, like stately marbles. They prided themselves on keeping small, keeping round, and keeping all together under one roof. Be the essence of one thing, they advised her. Pick an expertise and stick with it.
Perhaps you’d like to be an enthusiast? Choose one emotion and really develop it, they counseled. You could be eager, for instance. Eagerness is always attractive. Or, if you choose the negative, you could always follow in the path of Uncle e. His expertise is effrontery. Shameless nerve has its exponents.
But a restless enormity of emotions rainbowed over E. Choosing one of them for all existence? No! I must be adopted, she reasoned to herself. How could she be so unlike them and still be their kin? Yet her clan kept encouraging her toward a profession.
Three buds had begun to sprout along her spine, the beginnings of her adult arms. Perhaps they were meant to wrap around someone, E wondered. To high five with glee? Or wring elegiacally in sorrow?
To keep round and small, the family always nipped those buddings. But as E’s came in, the more emotions she seemed to feel, and she wanted to keep on feeling them. However, around her family, she bunched herself up in a ball and rolled in as stately a way as she could, trying to mask her growing empathy.
She noticed how, more and more, she effervesced when she felt enraptured, and endured when she felt enraged. Occasionally, envy of her more compact siblings spasmed. Imagine choosing a lifetime of expertise in that!
To make sense of the elaborate possibilities, she decided to write them down, so she opened an Excel file. Exaggerated, she typed. Emboldened. Embattled.
One day E caught her reflection in one of the shining windows that the family never curtained—what had they to hide?—and discovered that she had elongated into elegance with enchanting arms that could express all the emotions she could ever encounter. She was entranced, and practiced waving to herself.
But of course she was alone with her reflection for barely a moment before she was surrounded again. “We’ve decided on a perfect choice for you,” the uncle and grandma and great-grandpa and various siblings and cousins and her parents declared. “You could become an emoticon! Just roll down onto someone’s keyboard and make a smiley face!”
“What!” She flailed her new arms in outrage. “I’ve never been more embarrassed!” she shouted. “Or more encumbered by your small ideas!”
The entire family was appalled. Had their little elf become an enfant terrible? Look how long her arms have grown, her grandma observed. She certainly couldn’t be an emoticon now. Had she gone mad? the second cousins asked. Would she achieve excellence at all? her uncle worried.
“I want to edify and be edified—but emotionally,” she explained excitedly. “I want to feel everything!”
Everything? The e family was stunned.
“Emotions are elements. I want to encounter every single one of them, like knowing the periodic table!” E whirled her arms like a windmill out of control, then stomped up to her bedroom, where she would have slammed the door had there been one. Why would anyone need privacy?
They all followed her, gathering around her bed, round-eyed and shocked to the core. There she was in the covers with her laptop, furiously working on her spreadsheet. Enchanted, she entered. Elevated. Elastic. Energized.
“You cannot be an e without being an expert,” the uncle said.
“I won’t espalier my life!” E declared.
E considered escaping. She had a brief wild fantasy of flying on the back of an eagle to a rainbow world of emotions where she could roll sybaritically in feelings for eternity—but her family bobbed around her. They were inescapable.
“Very well, I suppose you must experience every emotion, though the very thought depletes me,” Grandma said. The whole family nodded vigorously. They could not embrace her ideas, but she was still estimable to them. How tall and rather efficient-looking she’d become.
I don’t ever want to choose just one feeling, she thought, and typed Erotic. Erroneous. Enmeshed.
“Oh dear,” Great-grandpa said. “You can’t be enamored with everything.”
“I want to feel ethical and feel embroiled and endorsed and …” She entered all these words in the spreadsheet. Then she made a new column and began entering definitions.
The next day she went out to experience the emotions she’d recorded and came back absolutely reeling. So she stayed home and began pouring through novels and entering appropriate quotes in the Excel file, for words such as Excoriating, Ecstatic, Embroiled, and Evocative. She was developing an almanac inside the encyclopedic spreadsheet of emotions.
Before long black and white wasn’t enough. She began charting in colors. She saw that the red of eros could mix with the indigo of embarrassment for a feel of something like romantic chagrin. A sleepy blue over the wakingest yellow conjured up a quality of being enraptured—green. She understood Endangered from her empathy with elephants. She typed Extinction. That seemed the grayest of all emotions. But what could she do about this wrenching sensation? She could only enter information. And, eventually, edify. Her entries might even educate. It would take her an eternity to get all the emotions deeply felt and fully categorized in their colors. She was making a commitment for a lifetime at least.
When next her family gathered at the long, long table and popped the excruciating formal question one more time, “What endeavor entices you?” she, now the editor par excellence, was able to answer definitively: “The Encyclopedia of Emotions.” That’s what
her spreadsheets became—not an index, but a trove.
Eventually E did go out and experience every one of the emotions on her list, though she always returned to enfold among them, the family’s eccentric, ever their own enigma, their brainy expert, their savant, a bit erratic, but increasingly enlightened, and always enlivening their esprit.
The Flibbertigibbet’s Flaw
A flute would flare—then fifteen-year-old F would flounce onstage, positively fetching in her French-fashioned gown. Every night before she went on, two dressers would primp her: first the chemise, then the petticoats, last the farthingale under her skirts. Then they’d glue the thread-like cord of a microphone beneath her wig. F spent her mornings taking minuet classes so she could float across the boards in her furbelows. Every afternoon she ran her frivolous lines. Her speeches had to be measured to the forkful. Six nights and two afternoons a week she minced delicately through her role. The discipline!
F simply didn’t have the personality of a flibbertigibbet. She had to tame her own full flavor in favor of the flirt she played. F was a free spirit—she itched at the fetters of fake frivolity. Yet she had fortitude. Under all the layers of frippery, she’d focus deeply on her performance, just as she practiced. But there were always one or two flaws. Every night she’d make a teensy mistake no one else would notice.
Except for one other person. The tall young flutist in the velvet jacket would notice. He was the musician who gave F her cues. He followed her with his flute through all the hours of lights and blocking and prancing in her finery. His flourishes on the silver keys prompted the words she tried so hard to say in the exact same order every time. He gave her fervor form. She was fire, but he was flow. He held her rhythms, careful not to destroy the fantasy of the audience.
And one night F performed flawlessly!
“Hey, I didn’t eff up once!” she shouted backstage immediately after the final curtain, forgetting the audience, still in the theatre, forgetting the microphone, still taped under her wig. Her fugitive shout seemed to light the dark stage brighter than firelight, and it felt to her, in the blackness behind the curtain, that she was strangely falling—falling …
Immediately the flutist threw his silver instrument into its case and fled from the wings toward her, extending both his arms and flattening her to his chest, burying her nose against his breastbone through his jacket, fitting his delicate fingers over her mouth and rocking her back and forth like someone who had just burst into tears.
Only F had not. She had merely let fly the first un-rehearsed words she’d spoken since the start of rehearsals.
She thought she’d performed it all to a fare-thee-well! But she had flown to the feast of frankness too soon.
F felt like a cave girl. She could have been tearing seared flesh from bones with her teeth, smearing juices with the back of her hand across her flushed face far from the fetters of formal talk and dress.
How could she have freed herself so early—and done it so ferociously loud?
Now her mouth was muted by his fine hand. She smelled his wrist at the margin of his sleeve, and twisted toward the fragrance of his neck, his hair feathered at the edge of his collar, his foulard loosening … and she rose up into another kind of cave, the cave of the flutist’s chest. Fiercely he tried to blow out that fire of hers, but he only fed it as he muffled her, muffled her, muffled her with a furred darkness where touch existed as the only sense except smell, the fog-smell of behind-the-curtain, and the palm-and-finger sheen-of-sweat intoxication as she fell against his velvet coat and he fell against the velvet curtain and they fell into the fanning of their fever.
Gallimaufry
Grab the pillowcase and go! Galumph down the stairs. Pass the growling chairs! Graze the grimacing table! Run the gauntlet of the hall, little g!
Even with his glasses on little g could hardly see the glimmer of sun at the end of the hall in the gloom. Everything was alive.
The clothes tree almost got him in its giant arms … But little g was nimble. He slid away, taking his loot out the screen door into a blast of summer.
After he plopped the pillowcase on the warm porch floor, he dropped into a squat. The floorboards shifted and wheezed in the heat. What ears little g had!—he heard everything. A glissade of bottle caps gushed from his pillowcase. Each cap had its own sound: screamy Cream Soda, crybaby Loganberry, giggle-bubble Ginger Ale. The bottle caps gyrated in the glow.
Back in the dark house Grandma packed his lunch. Plunk. Grapes and graham crackers plus a gooey sandwich hit the bottom. Snap. He heard the lunchbox clamp shut.
Little g lay down sideways, extending his arm. His quick fingers flipped each bottle cap to its topside. Click, nick, tick, wick, pick! He gathered and graded them. Some had giveaways printed under their tops. They got the top row. He kept the dented ones cooling in the bottle cap hospital—a rectangle of shade made by the porch banister.
As the sun warmed his knees and bum, little g looked backward, to curl around what he held. Grown Gs always have to face goalward, but a quick little g can grab what glistens. He touched the smooth backs of the caps, learning not to get nicked by the sharp parts. Compared to the wee caps, he was Gargantua.
Grouping was little g’s gift. He never tired of arranging his caps. Today he had them in Good, Great, Gold. He spied a squashed one and moved it to the bottle cap cemetery, a plastic bag. Light glanced off his glasses.
“Time to go!” gargled Grandma’s voice from way inside the dark house.
Now he had to swoop them all into the case. Back through the gauntlet: the cave of gargoyle clocks and gewgaws, their garbled gibberish taunting him as he veered through the gloom to the kitchen where his hand glommed onto the handle of his lunchbox. Got it!
Goodbye!
Back again past the gnarling, gnashing Goliath of the chesterfield, the gnomes of the unlit lamps galvanizing down the dark hall, lunchbox and pillowcase in hand, gesticulating to the day camp bus driver.
Wait!
Here comes the genius of the bottle caps, the Gulliver of Gleaners.
Hotel Religion
Half-pint h, the youngest in his family, slipped through the arms and legs of his huge older brothers as they hurtled around the house, snapping towels at one another—Mrs. H howling and Mr. H hectoring and growling. Nothing h had was his own; if it was his, the big guys swiped it. The little brother rarely had a towel to himself for eighteen years, let alone a pillow he could claim—they were all hurled in the fights. Diminutive, but big of heart, he longed for harmony.
Where was it? All the half-pint knew was that the battles got hairier as the brothers got huger. Mr. H grew humorless, and Mrs. H grew haggard.
Once a week, after Mrs. H got down on her hands and knees and cleaned the only bathroom, h charged in fast for a shower, watching the dirt from his toes swirl down the drain. Then he got to be first to use the navy blue towel that his mother said hid the grime.
Home became a dash between harrowing and hazarding.
The food fights took on guerilla tactics. The brothers and father faced off. The house became hell. h slipped out, forgotten. He hid and did his schoolwork on the laundry table in the basement, even spending the night draped across three plastic baskets of sweat pants when things upstairs got too hot.
Homework made h strangely happy: hypotenuses, hypotheses, hierarchies, horizontal vectors, heptagons, hexagons, and the breathtaking height of lines, especially if they were attached by a horizontal.
Upon high school graduation he left to dodge Heineken cans in hallowed halls and got a hard-won degree in hydraulic engineering.
At last H came to live in his own grownup habitat, a starter house where one bathroom spilled with his wife’s girlie stuff and the other overflowed with his twins’ disposable diapers. Plus, as a beginning specialist in floods, bridges, and sewage, H had a hectic new job—now he would travel for a living. His parents were no longer healthy and his brothers too busy brawling to care.
Harmony r
ested on a ledge between the heights of love’s responsibilities.
As he packed for work in the next city, then kissed his wife and baby boys goodbye, a thought announced itself: You need a religion. He confirmed his reservation in the taxi, got on the plane, and before he ate his peanuts, the thought became his own: I need a spiritual life. Later, he slipped his roll-aboard into the complimentary van, and arrived at his hotel, a mighty fortress of towers with a horizontal marquee.
Hark! The bellmen heralded his welcome with to-ing and fro-ing. The wheels of the luggage cart sang a kind of hymn. He made his way to the reception desk, presided over by a man in a gray suit with a stand-up collar. The altar, H realized, the holy place the visitor never gets to go behind. Readily he signed the register—a certificate of confirmation—then signed his credit card for incidentals—a pledge of tithes.
Chandeliers hung from the vaulted ceiling. Humongous urns of hibiscus overflowed. The height and space were like a hemisphere of childhood, free and protected. Well, like the childhood he hoped his twins would have.
You don’t need to bring a thing to a hotel, H marveled. It’s the respite every sinner from the street deserves. (Not that H was much of a sinner.)
The hush of the carpet led him down a nave of a hall to his own heavy door. There, a king-size bed awaited him with at least six pillows, all his own. For such is the mansion I enter, H said to himself, plopping his overnight bag on the luggage rack and hanging up his coat.
White towels lined the marble and mirrored bathroom. Hosanna! Clean lines marked all his ablutions. He attended to his beard in the backlit makeup mirror. He lifted up his washcloth as if he were lifting his infant sons from the arms of his wife. Fear not. Hallelujah! Share not your blessings this once.
Refreshed, he strolled out to explore the offerings. At the hotel buffet a cantaloupe square dissolved on his tongue. At the rail of the bar he drank the hotel’s wine. A telephone, like a saint in a niche, rang with his client’s voice, confirming his morning appointment. The sacred music the elevator played was Mrs. H’s favorite old song, “Heart and Soul”.
Alphabetique, 26 Characteristic Fictions Page 2