Watch Your Mouth

by Daniel Handler

  “Alphabetical?” she asked again. “Just tell me. In the opera, it’s alphabetical, it’s something like ‘Ah, By Clay Destroy Evil Forces, Golem, Help, Justice!’ Wait, there’s no I there, what begins with I?”

  “I don’t know,” the rabbi said, and started towards the door. “You’re very upset, Mimi, and I came here to offer you—I didn’t come here to talk about Jewish myths, for God’s sake. You can’t seek comfort in myths, Mimi. You have to seek comfort from your troubles with truth, with God. And I’m not offering you a judgmental God. You think God is nowhere. But he can be now here. I’m offering you God as Therapist—”

  “I don’t want a therapist,” she said. “I want a golem.”

  “We’ll talk later,” Tsouris said, in a voice that said: “You’re crazy.” He opened the front door. Outside the air prowled down Frost Road, Hemingway Way and Byron Circle like a stranger in a car. I stood up and walked to the doorway and watched his spidery hands as they buttoned his blazer. They were as spidery as Mimi’s, as spidery as Cyn’s; everybody’s hands were spidery. Everybody’s hands looked alike; from the wrists to the fingerprints we were all identical. Mimi took a few steps towards him, and he raised both hands defensively, halfway between benediction and shoving somebody off a cliff. “Will you make sure she gets some rest, Joseph?” he said to me. “I’ll talk to her later.” He turned to leave, now here, but soon nowhere. Behind me the wind blew some door shut—a sudden snare drum from the back of the orchestra. “You need some rest, Mimi,” he said, all God as Therapist. “Go to bed.” And as the rabbi turned to me I realized it didn’t have to be Therapist. It could be The Rapist. It could be God as The Rapist.

  “Take her to bed,” he said to me, and it all depended on how you looked at it.

  Act III, scene two

  The Glass home, in the dead of night. An early scene in Alma takes place in a graveyard in the dead of night. We know it’s the dead of night because we hear three tones of a church bell: “Bing! Bing! Bing!” The tolling takes its toll; just three notes from Christ’s sanctuary and the rabbis clutch their heads in agony and support themselves on headstones Mimi has fashioned out of plaster. But the Glass home didn’t have any church bells, or even a grandfather clock with its pendulum tongue hanging low and loose like impotence. It was a doorbell, ringing three times at three in the morning, that woke me up.

  I sat up instantly, so the entire audience could see my face. I threw the covers off me, leaving them to hang onto the mattress in a frozen grimace of rippled corners, as they had earlier in the evening when Cyn’s spidery hands had guided my mouth to her sex, still tainted, I swear, with the taste of her brother. She came quickly, and left quickly. I’d heard her enter her bedroom, followed no doubt by her silent father, and thought I caught a full-out moan just as the wind rose outside, covering the sound of Mimi entering Stephen’s room. Then I’d dozed until—I looked at my bedstand clock—three in the morning. Who could be ringing?

  The doorbell rang again, four bings. I didn’t hear anyone’s feet pattering on the Pakistani rug lining the entry hall; “Let it ring,” I could hear Cyn moan to the doctor, as she used to moan when the dorm phone rang, back at Mather. Well, I couldn’t.

  My own robe was wrapped around my stereo to keep out the damp of the Mather Summer Storage Spaces, but Ben had lent me one of his. I picked it up from where it was draped over my empty desk and tied it around my body. It occurred to me that it might be my box of books, arriving finally in some three A.M. emergency delivery so now I could write my paper on something other than opera and Cyn’s family.

  I didn’t have any slippers. Each of my footsteps was a bare, comfortable slap, covering all the gasping behind the bedroom doors. As I turned and slapped past the little wrought-iron table with claw feet, the window above it latched closed, the doorbell rang again, calling me like Pavlov. Ben’s rough cloth jostled against me as I neared the door, but as I reached for the chain lock something moved out of the shadows.

  I jumped back and knocked into a decorative ceramic pitcher from Mexico, which fell from its wicker perch to break into three large pieces on the floor, snapping like bone. The dog, of course, the dog. Cassius had nobody to fuck either, and so had slapped to the door himself and waited, black against black, for somebody to answer it. He’d been nowhere, and now here, like God. “Nice God,” I said, all three A.M. dyslexia. Who could it be?

  It was a block of clay, tall and dark like the cabinet of oak in which the TV sat back in the Glass den. Somebody had hoisted it on one of those wheeled carts—dollies?—and placed it on the front porch, a big geometric slab, a raw Stonehenge. It didn’t answer my question. Cassius stepped in front of me and sniffed it, and then jerked back as a white hand curled around it like a spider.

  “Sorry,” the hand (countertenor) screeched, and if there’d been another Mexican pitcher out on the porch I would have broken it. The hand led a whole pale body in overalls out from behind the block. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. Have you ever heard a countertenor? A man who can sing in a soprano range without surgery? It sounds like the squealing of brakes. “Mrs G. said I could deliver this any time.”

  You recognize this part, of course, the jaw-droppingly obvious suspicion. The Chief of Police promises Tosca that her true love won’t be executed, after all. The bullfighter says he loves Carmen no matter what. The maid announces the arrival of a man in a dark coat; “A dark coat?” the husband cries, at high E, but the wife just sits and keeps sewing. “If I dance for you,” Salome says, “I can have anything I want?” and the audience sits and fidgets, daydreams about a late supper, thinks Don’t be such a sucker. Get out while you still can, you stupid, stupid tenor.

  And I guess I could have, too; bounded past the clay monolith and down the color-coded thoroughfares to a bus station, a train station, an airport. I didn’t move, of course; it’s a four-act opera, and the hero is suspicious but keeps right on going. I nodded dumbly at this pale figure, and stepped aside; he tilted the dolly and rolled in what must have been thirty, forty pounds of clay. He stopped just as the wheels reached the biggest piece of pitcher. “She said it goes to the basement, but I don’t do that,” he said. “She can do that herself.” He reached deep into a pocket in the overalls—I watched his hand crawl around his stomach like surgery—and came out with a small clipboard, a pen dangling from a fuzzy white string. “You gotta sign for it. Right there.”

  Cassius sniffed at it, and I stared, in the light of nearby lampposts, at an “X” with a straight line. I remembered the argument I’d heard with Mimi and Stan, down in the Props Studio: Mimi was ordering too much clay. I didn’t want to be responsible for any Benedrum wrath, not while my books still hadn’t arrived and I was using their library gratis. I started to hand it back to him, unsigned, but his pale hands wouldn’t unclasp and take it. I looked him in the eye, this three A.M. countertenor, this mysterious visitor lugging clay in like a coffin, this augur of doom, this symbol. “Sign,” he said, applying the brakes again, and rather than see him any more, rather than hear him, I grabbed the pen and scrawled “Mimi” next to the X, found myself bowing back as he bowed to me and put the clipboard back in his body. As I shut the door I heard him shuffle off. Cassius was snuffling at the clay, but it was so dark and deep I couldn’t imagine it smelling like anything. I reached out and touched it, like those cavemen in the movie who touch a big black marble slab and change history forever. It was damp, damp and big, immobile and permanent as death, something that looked like it had always been standing in the Glass entryway.

  I reached down and picked up the pitcher pieces. I could make out dim drawings of animals which had been marching in a line around the rim. I was holding a bear, flanked by the first half of a cow and the last half of a fish. Did they even have bears in Mexico? Maybe this was a dream, this big slab sitting in the entry way of the Glasses’ like a warning. Maybe the radio was on in my room, and “Bing Bing Bing” had doorbelled its way into my slumber. I locked eyes wi
th the cow head and considered.

  The attic had no radio. BRUM: T.U.D. This wasn’t a dream-within-the-opera, this was just the opera. I put the remnants of the herd on the wicker table with the dim hope that somebody would think it had just broken, like Ben’s failed bones. In return I’d do a good deed. I angled my bare foot against the cold metal rim of the dolly, if that’s what it’s called, and leaned the clay toward my rickety body. The slab and I did a brief, sloppy two-step as I adjusted to its weight. When I reached the door to the basement steps, Cassius pulled out the dog-acting stops for the sake of ambience and whimpered, trembled and refused to go any further. There’s that obvious suspicion again, the operatic equivalent of ignoring a gunshot you hear in the next room. When is it ever, ever a car backfiring?

  My own spidery hand batted at the wall for the light switch, and for a few seconds I thought the slab, the dolly and I were all going to tumble to the basement floor and go the way of the pitcher. But the light flickered on and we began our descent, although with the slab leading the way I couldn’t see anything, really, until I reached the bottom of the stairs. Had I known the sheer horror which awaited me I never would have gone further than that door.

  It was spread out on an enormous table which was covered in a sheer white sheet. The light shone on it in almost fanatical brightness; I could see every crack, every smear, every knuckle and vein. Next to the table was a small utility cart with a stack of books and one of those fancy tins for olive oil. She’d used up all the oil, apparently, and had sawed off the top with something to store all her tools. There were some rubber spatulas, and little shovels and some knives, and a few wiry implements I’d never seen before. I’d never seen any of it before, really. I looked at the top book in the stack: Ritual was all I could make out in the title, the rest smeared by clay, but at the bottom, in a slender little marketing font, was “by the author of When You Can’t Be Friends with Your Mother .” And then I had to look at it again, even though I knew what it looked like and knew what it was. I knew what it was. At first it didn’t look like clay. At first, because it was so strange, I thought it was me; my reflection in some mirror being stored in the basement. But it wasn’t me: it was lying down. It wasn’t made of skin. It was dark brown, like the clay I’d dragged down here, and for a second it looked like liver, like some horrible hors d’oeuvre platter for cannibals. Who am I, chopped liver? my brain babbled, but it wasn’t me.

  You know what it was. If it’d had a head, it would have been maybe nine, ten feet tall; I knew that the block of clay I held had a head in it, waiting to emerge. I read somewhere that Michelangelo said that to carve a woman out of marble, all you had to do was remove all the parts of the marble that didn’t look like a woman. Mimi’s tools were rinsed. They were eager and dry. They would find everything that didn’t look like the head of the golem she was building in her basement.

  It was a man, at least I’m pretty sure it was a man. The genitals were a mere smooth lump, like on those plastic fashion dolls, but the hands were big, the shoulders enormous, the nails on the fingers were rounded and carved out carefully. Despite being uncovered, and despite the heat of the lights, it hadn’t dried. The golem looked damp. The wrists and ankles had visible veins, slivered into life by one of those wiry things in the oil tin. The bottoms of the feet had rough patches of crust, like someone who walks around barefoot all the time. It was excellent work. Nothing was dusting away on the golem; on the contrary, he looked in his prime. He looked ready, except for the head. He was almost ready.

  The cold damp of the basement slid through me, up through my bare feet, as I circled the sheeted table. It didn’t look like a person, even a headless one; it was too big, and it looked too much like clay. It looked like what it was, so large and sudden that it made a three A.M. delivery of clay look as boring as mail. It looked like a golem, a golem still in process, and there was no reason a golem should be in the Glass basement and I didn’t want to be there either. I was afraid to touch it, it looked so good. I could smear it, wreck it, or perhaps—or perhaps feel a pulse, a small ripple of muddy blood in the vein of dark clay. I didn’t want to look at the blank space of sheet just above the neck. I didn’t want to picture a face on it, any face, a face that could inhale and bring oxygen into the carefully-constructed lungs I was positive were in the cavernous chest, a face that would finish it, a face that could open its eyes. I walked backwards up the stairs, my cold feet shuffling rough friction on the chilly steps, both hands shaking for the bannister. When I reached the top of the stairs I couldn’t even turn the lights off and be alone in the dark with it, even for the mere moment before I opened the door, tripped over the dog in the darkness, shrieked and threw the door shut. Let the light stay on, Joseph sings, let it stay on all night, I will not return there. Let it banish the shadows from my soul and from this evil place.

  I turned the corner and nearly ran into the golem. I shouted one hoarse syllable and slipped to the ground as it towered over me, wrapped in its sheet. It was only when he reached down to me that I saw it was Mimi, her dark hair beheading her in the dim light. Her nightgown did look like a sheet, but as she stumbled over my stumble, I saw it wasn’t nearly as big: her arms were bare, her legs were bare, and as she floundered for a second on the floor, the hem shifted and I saw the curve of one of her buttocks. My own legs were splayed wide, with my robe nearly undone from my fall; she must have seen everything of me as she grabbed my knee in her panic and raised up to a kneeling position. Her nails dug into my knee as she found balance with one hand and hiked her nightgown down with the other. I retied my robe and looked up to meet her face. I expected to find her smiling sheepishly but her mouth was nearly invisible in the dark. What I could see were her eyes, wild sparks in front of the window that blew open doors.

  “What?” I hissed, instead of sorry. Mimi inhaled loudly and I looked at her face again. She might have been crying. “What?” I said again; the only reason a mother is up crying in the middle of the night is when someone has to go to the hospital.

  “Don’t you hear it?” she whispered. “Don’t you—can’t you hear it? Isn’t that why you came down here?”

  “What?” I said again, and she stood up. Above me, I couldn’t see anything but the sheet again; her nightgown ended in a dark hole, like something unfinished.

  “Don’t you hear it?” she hissed again, and in one gust my hopes that I’d been imagining everything, everything, like an elaborate sick opera staged in my head, crumbled like something knocked to the floor. Because I heard it, of course I heard it. I’d been hearing it every night, from a floor above.

  Standing next to Mimi listening to it felt like she was watching me have sex with her daughter. The muffled moans could be no one but Cyn, and the rhythmic creaking of the wooden floors could be nothing but sex with her. It wasn’t the wind. It had never been the wind. Dr. Ben Glass was sleeping with Cynthia Glass as sure as that cold clay golem waited downstairs. Mimi and I stood at Cyn’s door, almost pressed up against it in our concentration. Mimi sniffled again, and as she leaned against me I felt her tremble behind her nightgown. She whimpered, but I don’t think she was crying. Her trembling was furious, keyed-up, the friction of her body shaking against mine was more electric than sad. I leaned into her like an instinct, although from the audience it could just look like I was listening closer to the sound of my lover with her father. Mimi murmured something, and then gasped. The gasp was because of my other instinct. Beneath my garment, like a half-finished secret, I was coming to life, and I felt her gasp against the thin triangle of my exposed skin, at the neck of the loosening robe. But I don’t know what the murmur was. In the rustle of our draping and undraping clothing, as the lowering curtain likewise rustles over a thin and deep bed of cellos, I made myself miss the murmur. I told myself that it wasn’t really my family, and so her murmur didn’t apply to me, not at all. A real son or daughter had to hang on every word a mother said, but that wasn’t me. I could ignore what I wanted and concentrat
e only on the sensation of her breath, Cyn’s distant moans and the creaking of the wooden floor. I told myself those were the only sounds in the house. I told myself that it wasn’t really my family, and so I didn’t have to hear the word she murmured against my skin. It wasn’t me. Motherfucker. Curtain.

  [The audience strolls out of the auditorium and chats about subjects tangentially related to the action.]

  Why didn’t he leave, why didn’t he just leave? That’s the trouble with modern operas, with modern settings: the audience asks modern questions. You wouldn’t think of telling Madame Butterfly to wise up vis-a-vis Pinkerton’s return, or asking Othello to rethink his hankie-as-proof-of-adultery schemata, or telling all those women in winged helmets to sit down together and think up a way to break the Ring Cycle. Oedipus, how about you find out more about this girl before you make your move?

  No. The bounty of Cyn’s body is becoming a stronger motif than the T.U.D., but let it; it was. In all likelihood the soprano they get for Cyn won’t have the same skin that enveloped me and kept me in unwavering place like a bone. Each night, the restless damp of her skin, sweat-tinged with summer, would turn my own restless damp into my own restless damp. Cyn would tuck me in as my penis still quivered, and would lean close to allow me to taste each nipple before she padded downstairs to her father. I couldn’t leave that, that tucking in, those breasts dangling like bait: it was a booby trap. I couldn’t leave, not with her sex in front of my eyes, the flush of her climax against my throat, around my fingers, through the blankets of the bed she no longer lingered in. I couldn’t part with the parting of her legs, couldn’t pack my things as she unpacked me, one sticky night bending me over the desk and flicking her tongue between my buttocks until I spent a salty sob on the blotter where my paper was supposed to be written. The next morning the stain was still there, left there each morning by the set decorator for continuity’s sake, along with the one in the hallway, following the close of Act III.