by Marc Parent
The Choking Pearl
SHE WANTED TO BITE A CHUNK out of the man’s cheek the way Plath had done to Hughes. Really mark him. Or piss on his leg the way her mother’s dog pissed on every fence post and wall. As he spoke to her—something about the Shakespeare Garden in Central Park blah blah blah—she focused on his lips moving and thought about how the female praying mantis bit the head off the male as they fucked because the males fucked harder as they died. It made the death of male bees seem almost disgustingly passive in comparison. Bees as passive-aggressive, she could see that. They liked to hover and menace, but when push came to shove they never really did anything until you cornered them. The threat of bee stings in her childhood had been highly overemphasized, she thought.
What was he saying now? His lips, my God, they had to be injected with something. Whale blubber or lard or something. They were impossibly huge. How did he speak with them?
Oh yes, concerts in the park, blah blah, New York at its egalitarian best, blah blah, “a virtual subway population infused with joy.” Had he actually said that? What time was it and why had Judith gone off with that angular man with the Andy Warhol hair? If he hadn’t been dead, it could almost have been Warhol. Lucy had loved that movie about him recently, that one with Lilly somebody playing that crazed dyke—God, that was good. Did it mean something bad about her that she had rooted for the crazed dyke and made the notation “SCUM Manifesto” on her hand in the dark of the movie house? Worse still, what did it mean that she had never had any problem laughing through the Baby Jane movie up to and including the scene where Bette Davis is body-kicking the crippled Crawford? Lucy had nearly broken up with someone following that movie. “I just don’t know how you could have laughed at that,” he had said. “Did you hear yourself? You were the only one laughing during that scene in the entire theater.” Now she wouldn’t have done what she’d done then, which was cry and manipulate herself out of seeming the ogre she knew inside of herself she wasn’t. Now she would have taken the more mature route and said, “Oh, fuck you.”
She nodded her head. What had she nodded her head at? She could see that it had made the man smile at her in a new way, a sort of leering, affectionate way—his big lips moving about the lower half of his face were thoroughly out of control now.
He reached out and took her empty glass. “Vodka rocks coming right up!” She had heard that.
He turned away and cut back through the others toward the bar inside. She was wobbly and off balance without his face to anchor her. She thought briefly of sitting down but then decided against it. How could you bite a man in the face with any authority from a seated position?
Judith had taken her to the party to get her out of her apartment “for at least a few fucking hours!” Judith had yelled at her, “You’re turning into Bill!” Bill was a man Judith had slept with. He hadn’t left his West Village apartment in twelve years. Judith’s words had done the trick. Lucy left a note for her boyfriend, Tom, and hurried up to Judith’s in a cab to try and find an outfit she wouldn’t look absolutely ridiculous in. Lucy had relied on Judith’s closet for as long as they’d known each other. She couldn’t wear most of Judith’s things, but there were always a few classic items that Judith seemed to buy but never wear—a sort of Midwestern penance for her urban chic flair.
“Here we are,” the lip man said. She had to find out his name but it felt as if it had been forever since she last spoke. Back in college she and Judith had driven to Rochester all day during a blizzard to go to a concert Lucy had no interest in. Along the way they had picked up a guy and two girls at a gas station who Judith noted had leaned a PETTY OR BUST sign up against the pump. Lucy had had to sit next to the guy—the sort of guy who said Dude! a lot, loudly, and talked about ‘jamming’ and ‘reading the flyleaf for the tip-off,’ something she had never decoded in the ensuing twenty years. Somewhere in the midst of that concert, with Judith lost yelling the words “You . . . ! don’t . . . ! have . . . ! to live . . . !” and thrusting her fist in the air each time, the guy had turned to Lucy and, as if a thought he’d been fishing for had just popped into his head, yelled, “Cottonmouth?”
Lucy had no idea what this was. To make him stop looking at her she yelled, “Yeah!”
TOM AND LUCY were having problems. They had been since two weeks before, when they’d inadvertently returned to the habits of their younger dating selves and Lucy had asked Tom how many people he had slept with before they met. As soon as it was out of her mouth she wanted to take it back, but you did not admit to such cowardice, not if you were Lucy. “Walk down that road into the lion’s den!” she heard a voice say to her. “No prob,” she’d say, already hitching up her skirt.
Perhaps if he had even known the number, that would have been a good thing. Perhaps if he had said 542 plus you! It would have been intense but she could have taken it. “Twist my nipples and call me a whore!” she could have said and bedded him then and there, staking her claim at 543. But it had not been so simple.
“What I like most, actually,” the man with the lips was saying. Was he hovering closer now? It felt like it. “Is that stunning single pearl.”
Inside Lucy said, “What?!” but outside she tilted her head down to take a drink and quickly scanned her memory of what she was wearing. The pearl, the pearl, what is he talking about? All she could see was Tom walking into the living room of her one-bedroom apartment. “Eighteen,” he said. An hour later, after retabulating, he coughed out “twenty-three” from his spread-legged position on her Jennifer convertible loveseat.
Okay, yes, the pearl. She could feel the cool spot against her breastplate where Judith’s giant faux Leiber pearl rested against her. In what had been an afterthought, Lucy had agreed to wearing it to try and distract from a blouse she considered a bit too revealing even if it was white silk.
“There aren’t enough buttons on this thing!” she had yelled inside the bathroom to Judith. (How old had they been, somewhere in their late twenties maybe, when they no longer stayed in the bathroom together talking when the other one was on the john.)
“Did you just growl?” the man asked. Had she? If so, he hadn’t seemed to like it.
“Acid reflux,” she said. The first words she uttered in what felt like hours were particularly repellent ones. Why not just yell “Toilet!” or “Mucus!”?
But she didn’t care what he thought. She only cared about his cheek. She stared at it. He wasn’t leaving; the single pearl must trump the irritable bowel. How had Plath ever gotten such a purchase on Ted Hughes’s cheek? She knew he was supposedly megaman, a sort of poetry Popeye that got—in one of Lucy’s least favorite but often apt phrases—Plath’s panties in a wad. He had even written several poems about it—sort of the bite of death as opposed to the kiss of death—which Lucy had liked.
She saw Tom in his boxer shorts saying, “I think I’ve got it. Thirty-one.”
“You will?” the lips said, “that’s outrageous. I can’t believe it!”
Oh God, what had she agreed to do? She felt his hand at her elbow and a bit of pressure there as he guided her through a small group of people toward what she knew was their destination the horror-struck moment she saw it. How could it be possible that at this party they would have a karaoke machine?
“No higher than forty, I swear,” Tom said, over the phone that afternoon, “but I need a few days to come up with an exact number. It’s really bugging me.”
Applause was surrounding her now. For an instant, as two partygoers leaned in to say something to each other, Lucy saw Judith in the corner with the tall Andy Warhol. Her face was familiar somehow, in expression: it had the look Judith always had when Lucy was about to make a fool of herself in public. Inside, Lucy winced—that face of Judith’s marked another side of her, the side that didn’t like Lucy because Lucy wasn’t cool and didn’t have good clothes and had sort of grown up and gotten too serious about things like reporting on time for work and considering what vision-care packages various emp
loyers offered. The geekier side that Judith had left behind when the two of them had moved East after graduating from a school that Lucy had been sworn to never mention out loud, even when it was just the two of them. The farthest she could go was to call their alma mater Sewage U. in reference to both the experience and the location of its laughable quad at the bottom of a hill marked by the town’s sewage treatment plant. Judith had been homecoming queen of Sewage U. This was the memory that always accompanied the expression she saw on Judith’s face now. It was the only ammunition that Lucy had in those moments. Otherwise, Judith’s life had seemed to play out perfectly as a passion play of fleeing what you most wished to leave behind.
Was Tom out recalibrating his numbers? Somewhere in the East Village rounding up for the sake of simplicity?
“Okay,” lips prompted, “song selection.”
Lucy’s glass was empty. She waved it at him. Her single pearl bounced against her breastbone. Were her breasts showing? Ah, who gave a shit! Come on 543!
Her glass was full again. She saw someone with teeth—not that everyone didn’t have them, but in this woman handing her a new drink it had been all she’d seen. Big ones. White.
“We’re going,” she heard. She looked up. She was sitting on a padded leather bench now. She could feel wind tunneling down the open neck of her shirt; there was barely any cleavage to block it. “Jodie Foster,” she thought, sitting up stock still, “Carriage is key!”
It was Judith talking to her. Lucy stared through the years and landed on the only thing that had really changed about Judith— crow’s-feet. God help her, Lucy found them beautiful. How they showed off her eyes the way a good setting made the most of any gem. In a world that was getting increasingly ugly hour after hour, year after year, her few female friends were getting more beautiful. The bad news was that Lucy felt like she was the only one that knew this. It was her secret.
“I love you, Judith,” she felt like saying, but she knew if she did she would slur it. Had Plath been aiming for Hughes’s lips? They were drunk, right? He must have seemed like a rock face. Nowadays Plath would get crampons and cleats. “Have fun,” she said to Judith, trying to include the tall Andy Warhol in a sort of walleyed nod of her head. It was not worth really looking at him. She knew she would never see him again. Judith was in Tom’s league these days. She never embarrassed herself like Lucy did, but she always woke the next morning having had a good fuck after these parties. While Lucy scraped herself off the mattress reeking of booze and either saw Tom-of-the-millions beside her or no one, Judith was waking in clean Frette sheets alone but in a wholly different way than Lucy’s alone felt. She should have known something was up the first time she saw Judith eat toast when they were at Sewage U. Judith ate thin dry toast with just a dab of jelly. Judith understood what a portion was and never dared to have a whole one save in the bedroom.
She was watching Judith’s back—it was lovely—and tall Warhol as they said good night to the host. A host who looked upset. A host, Lucy realized, who was making apologies to what she now saw were quite a few people rushing the door. “. . . never . . .” she heard over the noise of the people nearby. “...out of control...” and then a somewhat heightened “. . . your friend?”
When did you become someone others whispered about? And was it just her mother’s constant paranoia that had prepared Lucy for it, was her mother guilty of conditioning her to make an ass out of herself so that her mother’s belief that everyone was always looking at them would be justified?
“Bathroom,” she said to lips. She was striking gold here. Next time might just be “tumor” or “tubular ligation” or “incontinent.”
She was old enough to know that the best way not to fall was not to lurch and the best way not to lurch was to stand up by sort of slowly sliding up to standing. She managed this and, keeping her mother’s idea of where people’s eyes were trained uppermost in her mind, walked quite averagely to the short hallway and then turned. Exit stage right.
It was an old apartment, large and commodious like few, as an outsider, that she had ever spent any real time in. Only at parties in the last fifteen years had she been in what people called “real New York apartments.” To her, this translated as places with enough space and light that you didn’t feel the inside of your skull was filled to shrieking from time to time with bugs and vermin.
She saw the bathroom to the left but passed by it. It wasn’t what she was looking for. There was a child’s room, with an abandoned mike lying on the bed—ah, the karaoke machine dwells here, she thought. The bed looked comfortable but she couldn’t go there. “Your friend?” she imagined being said over her passed-out form. No, none of that.
When she opened the door at the end of the hall, she let out a sigh. The laundry. She wasn’t in Kansas anymore. How could she care what a woman who actually had a washer and dryer in her own apartment thought of her? Judge on! You know not of burden or of challenge, my friend! And the one window in the room had the lovely look she wanted. There would be, no doubt, a fire escape or, at the very least, since they were on the top floor, those three or four permanent metal rungs that led to the roof. It had been years, but what seemed like not long ago Judith had once dared her to gain access to her own roof that way.
She walked toward the window. New and double hung. She knew enough to envy. Windows like this were another reason why people with apartments like this weren’t on Paxil, Lexapro, or Effexor. It was quiet in here for God’s sakes.
“Lucy?”
She turned. It was lips.
A phrase about Hughes from Plath’s journals entered her mind, “He has a health and hugeness.” No wonder she wanted to bite him.
“The party is sort of winding down,” he said. “I think the host is pissed that we commandeered her kid’s machine. Not done, apparently.”
He hesitated for a moment, waiting for her to say something. “I guess I’m going,” he said.
“Would you do me a favor?” she asked.
He brightened. “I’d love to.”
“Don’t tell them that I’m back here, okay?”
“They know already, Lucy,” he said, not really smiling. “Everyone saw you stumble toward the bathroom.”
“Are you capable of lying?” Lucy asked.
“Are you okay?” He was no longer attracted to her, she could see that. His attraction had fluttered out of the room as soon as she’d begun speaking full sentences for the first time all night. He asked if she were okay because he was a good person and because he had to, not because, after they left that laundry room, he would want to explore the issue further.
“Is Judith gone?”
“Who?”
“My friend who was with the guy with the platinum page-boy.”
“Yes.”
“Can you just go away?” Lucy asked. She was not going to bite his cheek. She was not someone who could create a heroic drama out of a brief encounter with a strange man. She was not that selfish. Or gifted.
“Wow,” he said. But he turned and left.
She had to work fast. In a little while the host would come looking for her—everyone saw you stumble toward the bathroom. How, she wondered, did we all grow up and become so goddamned lame? So goddamned safe! Where was she when they were giving lessons on portion control? Where was the big poet with the Scottish or Welsh or Yiddish accent? Tom was probably eating take-out burritos and watching Inside the Actors Studio for the eight-hundredth time.
Eight hundred. Perhaps that would be the final accounting of a fact she had stopped caring about after he couldn’t get the answer right the first time.
She walked briskly to the double-hung window, opened it smoothly—no soap needed to grease the slide—and felt the chilled air slam against her waist and hips. Her shoes were always flats—she could wear one pair of precious Cole Haans for five years with occasional repair. She straddled the window frame and with her hands braced in front of her steadying her body, she ducked her head and chest outside
the window. Looking up, she’d spied what she’d wanted ever since she’d seen Judith’s face across the room. A way out of this place that didn’t include going back through the same door they’d all come in through. There they were, three iron rungs that had been a part of this building for over a hundred years. Freedom was only moments away.
Modern Times
Young’un, do you know it used to take Pa six hours to make a hearth broom, but with the machine he got last year he can make over a dozen in a day?
—MARC PARENT, Believing It All
THE SQUAD WORE FATIGUES and scrambled through a scene that might have been painted by Hieronymus Bosch, if that man had been fortunate enough to visit a contemporary junkyard. The doomy landscape of burned-out cars was seeded with human skulls. The group was led by a bald woman in a black leather coat that swept the ground as she ran. The guns of the pursuing robots blazed like Mag-Lites and chirped like the gizmo used to unlock a Ford Taurus. She’ll step on that coat and fall, he thought, but he was the one who caught his foot and went down. The androids were on him in a flash. They threw a quilt over his head and were ringing to each other. This seemed a signal to close in for the kill. He struck out violently with arms and legs. The ringing sounded . . . well, actually it sounded like an alarm clock.
Now he could feel the heat from her body. He could see her naked flank beside him under the covers. By the time he got his head free of the bedclothes, the ringing had stopped. He could smell smoke.
She was already sitting up, with a Marlboro going.