He smiled at his lover. Ned could be such a drama queen. He held out his hand, waiting for the key.
“Ned, I’m sorry.”
Ned, aesthete that he was, did something completely out of character. He grabbed Stone by the shoulders, spun him around, and smashed him against the door.
“You aren’t sorry, you’re sick.” His eyes were ice. “You’re going to fuck up every meaningful relationship over your mother. You disgust me. Kamela was right. Norman Bates, revisited.”
Stone was shocked. He sputtered out, “But you don’t understand—”
“I understand perfectly. She lives in you, and she’ll never leave you. Never. And I’m not going to be your goddamned exorcist. You’re pretty cute for a budding psychopath; too cute. That’s dangerous for me. My self-destruction is merely an affectation; I want to keep it that way.”
“You can’t mean this—”
“—is what I’ve been saying to myself all week: he’s not talking to me because I don’t hate his mother. Howie, I don’t share your obsession with her. Paint a picture, get it out of your system. Now shut up. I want to remember you.”
He embraced Stone in his pale arms and gave him a kiss, full on the lips. The kiss ended in a sharp, stinging bite. Stone jumped back, surprised. Ned looked like a vampire, all in black, a dot of blood on his lips.
“They say you can’t get blood from a Stone.” He laughed at his own joke. “Oh, well. The key, Howard. There’s only room for one nut in this relationship, dear. And you’ve upstaged me.”
You took that away from me, too. Stone shivered next to the station wagon. Ned had earned quite a bit of notoriety. He lived in London now, owned and operated a graphic design company that designed book jackets and CD booklets for arty authors and pop bands. He’d also written and illustrated an award-winning children’s book. Stone never heard from him or Kamela.
He had a sudden urge to burn the boxes of the crap he was bringing up, to destroy them in a raging bonfire. But he stopped himself. After closing the car door, he went in the house to get himself a glass of water. On his way to the kitchen, he saw her. A holographic ur-Madonna. She even seemed to move. He felt her spirit hovering everywhere: in the house, in these magazines and books, in this car. She did live inside of him and popped into memories like an uninvited guest. Even his very soul was her domain. How to be rid of her? The violence he’d felt earlier returned. He wanted to shred the wallpaper from the walls, rip the stuffing out of the couches. To shatter the haunted picture. He stopped himself. The violence he felt wasn’t physical, it was spiritual and he had to battle her encroaching presence on a spiritual level. But how?
- - -
The Emerald City Bar was dank and smoky, just as he’d thought it would be. The low level lighting hid the dark green of the decor—the bar stools and the green marble countertop. In the other room, there was loud music and dancing; flashing lights changing colors. Stone sat rigid, as he nursed a Tom Collins through a thin green straw. He scanned the prowling, roving males. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea; he suddenly felt his age. The blaring, computer-chip pop bands gave him a headache. He just couldn’t get into the bleeping, oddly rhythmic music—the DJ announced, “Here’s ‘Ventolin’ by Aphex Twin.” A thousand boys gave themselves to the swooshing music, a bacchanalia. One boy in chaps walked through the audience, fording his way through. Stone fixated on his glistening, pale buttocks.
He’d misjudged. Stone heard the name The Emerald City and immediately thought of old school queers: Judy Garland queens; a piano playing show-tunes. But this was too modern. After he finished his drink, he would try another bar.
A human voice accompanied by acoustic guitar and muted orchestration broke the monotony of dance music. The voice was female, both smoky and crystalline, like a cross between Enya and Billie Holiday. Stone glanced up to the small monitor above the bar. For once, a video that didn’t make his head throb. The singer was dark, coffee-colored, and she wore an electric-blue sari. She was Asian, though her music was a mixture of blues and classical. The video intercut sinuous images of her against a background of shifting, silvery fonts—the lyrics, apparently—with a narrative. A young boy was sneaking around in a dilapidated mansion, trying door after door. The effect was hypnotic. At the song’s climax, the final door was flung open and the boy’s horrified face gazed upon the embalmed corpse of some huge Eva Peron-like figure, on a dais, surrounded by wax orchids and cheap votive candles. Weird, but effective. The credits flashed on the screen: “Sediment” by Ganesa, dir. Edward Meniscus.
It was several moments before Stone put his drink down. Edward Meniscus: Ned. So, he’d turned to video direction as well. Bitterness and hatred rose in his throat. He slammed down money on the countertop and turned to stalk out of the bar. He stumbled into a dark man with a small mustache; he was reminiscent of Langston Hughes, features-wise. He didn’t seem mad and smiled at Stone.
“I’m sorry,” Stone said, slow and deliberately.
“Not at all,” the man returned, “the fault was all mine.”
- - -
The drive home had been long. Billboards and neon signs sped past, burst into flame. The giant pig in front of the Piggly Wiggly Supermarket glared at him, like one of Ned’s drawings. He’d been inattentive during his conversation with Brion. But the bits and pieces he’d heard—the man did Patti LaBelle and Dorothy Dandridge in a weekend drag show—was enough to convince him that he’d made the right decision. When they got to the house, Brion insisted on a nightcap before retiring. He passed by her.
“Who’s this?” Brion asked, sipping a gin and tonic.
“My mother.”
“She still lives here?”
Stone almost said yes. “Sometimes.”
Brion looked confused by the statement. “You have her eyes.”
“No, I don’t. Finish your drink.”
Stone began to knead Brion’s shoulders. He was awkward; it had been too many years. He then steered him upstairs, leading to the Forbidden Room. Its guardian angel, in a tube top and stretch pants, with the wings of a Llardro figurine, said, Don’t.
“Shut up,” said Stone.
“Excuse me?” said Brion.
“Shut up,” Stone said, and quieted him with a kiss. Oh, it had been too long. His mouth was sweet. His darkness was Kamela’s, and his maleness was Ned’s. Brion broke the kiss and glanced toward the bed, huge and foreboding. A horror movie bed. Some ancient Hollywood crone should be moldering away on that bed, Joan Crawford or Bette Davis.
“Are you sure we should do it here? I mean, it looks like an antique.”
“It’s fine,” Stone said. “I’ve always wanted to do it in this bed. Get yourself comfortable. I’ll be back.”
Stone’s erection was painful. But he had to complete the ceremony. He ran downstairs and pulled the portrait of Martha Stone from the wall. He walked up the stairs carefully. The room’s guardian angel was smoking a cigarette; she wore a green polyester leisure suit and scowled at him. He pushed her out of the way. He propped the portrait on top of a drawer chest facing the bed. The lace curtains were pulled, a dark form stirred within. The next thing he knew, Stone was in the bed, writhing and wrestling.
You there, Mother? See me? I’m having sex with a Negro man. Look at me. Watch me.
I can’t, Howard. The curtains are closed.
“So they are. Just a second.”
“What?” Brion murmured.
Stone pulled himself off of Brion and opened the curtains. There she was, a head floating about the chest.
“What’s that?” Brion lifted himself up a little.
“Don’t you worry about that—”
But Brion had seen. He began to laugh. Stone attacked him then. Within seconds, he had the man beneath him, moaning and laughing. The laughs became gasps. At the moment of climax, Stone shouted, “Look at me! Mother, look at me!” Something cracked. The bed shuddered with their orgasms. It shuddered with their weight. With a sickening jolt,
they descended to the floor, riding a raft of white lace. When they realized they wasn't dead, or even hurt, Stone laughed triumphantly.
Brion extracted himself. “You are one sick child.”
“Get out. I’ll call you a cab, and pay them. But get out.”
He gathered himself from the wreckage of the bed. As he walked out of the room, he glanced at his mother. The glass was cracked over her face. And she was dead. Dead.
- - -
He slowly became aware of knocking on his door. He withdrew from the landscape in front of him. This one was his best yet: spiny leaves strangled a noble dogwood tree; it wept petals; a Southern Belle knelt at the feet of a modern black woman in a business suit; Tara burned in magenta and gold flames. He put down his paintbrush. A bit histrionic, but it captured what he was trying to say.
Again the soft, insistent knocking. Who’d knock, when there was a doorbell? One of her stupid, redneck friends? Three weeks since she’d been exorcized and he still felt still euphoric. He walked up the stairs, and at the top was greeted by the face of a woman who had a magical grace. Hello, Frida. But Frida Kahlo didn’t smile back, not like she would’ve. Frida didn’t smirk or judge.
The living room was a mess. He could scarcely remember ripping up his work for the greeting card company. Now the mangled cheap imitations of Beatrix Potter artwork littered the floor like confetti He stepped over these and a couple empty cobalt-blue vodka bottles. He was an artist; he was entitled to moods. And after a decade of restraint, why not kick up his heels a little?
The idiot knocked again. He smiled as he opened the door.
Mother stood there, wearing a flowering monstrosity of a hat: plastic pansies in dull colors. She was in a black gown (polyester, of course), one that trailed and draped over the front porch. One hand held a glass of Electric Lemonade. She’d had her hair freshly dyed, too, for this visit. The wax lily was still pinned to her gown as a poor debutante’s cortège.
“Really, Howard,” she said, pausing to sip her bright, urine colored beverage, “you didn’t have to go that far to get my attention. Sleeping in my bed with a colored boy—as if I didn’t know you was a bio-sexual. But my priceless bed—I could just cry, landsakes. Honestly! But don’t you worry, dumplin’, Mama was here last time you had one of your spells. She’ll be here for this one. Now, I simply must do something about this pigsty.” She kissed him, and enveloped him in her cloying, yet comforting fragrance. She floated into the room and at once began to tidy everything up.
There was a faint numbness on his cheek where she had kissed him. He put his hand there, pulled it away, and examined it. There was no blood. Just the coldness of the grave. Then he remembered. You can’t get blood from a Stone. He laughed finally, at Ned’s awful pun, feeling a peculiar kind of joy.
Come Join We
After my fever broke, I found that I could see things in a different way. People, animals, even some objects acquired a strange luminosity, as if seen through a prism. My grandmother’s head, for instance, was swathed in a shimmering halo of pearly mist. At first I thought that this was only a trick of sight. I’d been sick for over two weeks; by then I was used to seeing things through a haze. Not only that, but my grandmother’s hair was pearl gray. Maybe my eyesight had been damaged from the illness. I could accept this, but at times her head seemed to floating on a cloud of mist over her body. I would stare at what resembled flower petals in the mist, which always subsided, shrinking into an aura of dull silver around her head.
Granny’s face would wrinkle with concern, like an old leather purse. I’d say nothing, keeping my miraculous vision to myself.
My mother’s halo, on the other hand, would fluctuate between falling snow and silver glitter. It changed according to her mood like the holographic postcards of the Virgin the Sisters sold at the Divine Annunciation gift shop where she worked. Mary sorrowful, hands folded, eyes downcast; turned another way and you see Mary smiling, her eyes looking toward heaven.
But I could not ignore a stranger, a woman in our front doorway. And so I told Granny.
She adjusted her spectacles. She’d been working on her needlepoint. In turning her head, the shawl draped around her shoulders slipped. She peered at the doorway. She squinted.
“There’s no such thing,” she said. The mist around her French-braids subsided.
“Yes, there is.” I was shivering. I was still weak. She walked over to me, and sat beside me on the sofa. She pulled my head to her bosom and enveloped me in cinnamon, rose toilet water and sweat.
“She still there?” she asked after a while.
I peeked through the mesh of her shawl. “Yes.”
Granny looked through the mesh of the screen door. She said, in a theatrical tone of voice, “Go away, woman, and leave my grandson alone.”
“Granny!” I said.
“I’m sorry. I just thought that... I’m sorry. What does she look like, this woman?”
I lowered the shawl. I felt safe in the circle of her arms yet I hesitated before describing her: “She’s almost as tall as Mom, and a little darker than her, too. She’s wearing a white dress with blue flowers printed on it. Her hair’s braided and the braids are covered in glass beads. She looks so sad. She’s crying.”
The woman had begun floating on a blue-green mist, but I didn’t tell Granny this.
Granny stopped holding me. Her eyes were unfocused, slightly glazed over. I snuggled against her for warmth, more out of habit than out of real fear. I knew that the woman in the doorway couldn’t come inside. And if she did, she wouldn’t hurt me.
Granny looked at the screen door with a suspicious eye. “White dress with blue flowers, eh?”
I nodded, burrowing into her bosom.
“Does she have a thin face, this woman you see?”
I stole a glance. “Yes—and there’s a little spot of white, just above her right eye.”
“Does she look like your mother?”
I nodded again.
Granny leaned back against the headboard. She gently pulled me against her. “It’s your Aunt Ondine, who died before you were born.”
“My Aunt Ondine?” I asked. I’d never heard of her before.
“Yes. She died fifteen years ago. She drowned.”
I pulled myself out of Granny’s grasp to study the woman. She wasn’t looking at me, or anything at all, really. She seemed locked in her private world. If I stared at her too hard, she wavered. Ondine was pretty, with dark brown skin bathed in dew. Her eyes were dark and deep, gateways to something secret. Her tears had glints of iridescence in them. If anything, death made her beautiful not like those cinema films where ghosts were evil things, with worms in their eyes, reeking of the grave. I caught her scent. She smelled slightly of...oranges.
“How did she die?”
“I don’t know if I should tell you,” Granny said, standing up. “Your mother wouldn’t like it.”
I must have looked sad, or scared. Probably both. Granny relented. As she started on her tale, I kept a close eye on Aunt Ondine.
“Ondine was my first girl child, she came on the heels of your Uncle Zeke. It was a difficult birth. Three days of sweating and pain. And what did I get for all that work? A fragile thing, not much larger than your Granddad’s hand. She came feet first. I should have known, then. She didn’t seem to like life much. Like she knew that her time here was limited. She was a sweet, dreaming girl child, her thoughts turned towards other things. At first, I thought she was a mute, ‘cause she didn’t say nary a word. Maybe I was too busy having other kids, or taking care of your Granddad.” Ondine was disappearing, her mist blending into the overall blueness of dusk. “Then one day, she’s four or so, she says to me, ‘Why is the sea whispering?’ In just those words. I was just besides myself—”
“How come you didn’t go to the doctor, to have her checked out?”
“In those days, we were a lot more isolated than we are now. They hadn’t even built the bridge. People who wanted to see us took t
he ferry.
“So, anyway, I say to Ondine, ‘Why, dumplin, that’s just the sound of the tide. And she looks at me, her face as solemn as a monk’s. She says, ‘No. I hear voices. People talking, whispering in the sea.’ So I said to her—”
The screen door slammed open. Mom home from her job at the vendor-booth. She walked right through her now transparent sister. She walked over to me, and planted a kiss on my forehead. “Feeling better?”
“Yes.”
Granny had gotten up, and was heading toward the kitchen.
Mom asked, “You feel good enough to go to school tomorrow?”
“Not that good.”
She laughed. The tiredness vanished from her face momentarily.
I could see the crying woman no more.
I said to Mom, “Granny was just telling me about Ondine.”
She frowned at me, then at grandmother. Strands of cloud-snow engulfed her aura. She was angry.
“What did you tell him that for?”
Granny was quick and sly: “The child had been rifling through some old photograph books. He came upon her picture. What’s so wrong about telling about your sister?”
Mom had no answer for that. Her snow-flare darkened and swirled.
“I think that the child ought to know about his family’s history.” Granny looked away from her daughter and pretended to be annoyed. I could tell that she was lying, her pearl-light pulsed triumphantly.
“Boy, what are you looking at?” My mother’s voice was sharp.
“Nothing,” I stuttered. I wrapped myself in a blanket.
Mom moved away, looking for dinner. Eventually, her snow settled down, becoming less fluttery. Only one more weird thing happened that night: when she sat down to pray, my mother’s aura shimmered and snuffed out when she held her rosary. The rosary beads, heavy and lead, didn’t jingle as they usually did. They hissed.
Sea Swallow Me and Other Stories Page 8