Man or Mango?

by Lucy Ellmann

  CORNY TEMPTATIONS OF SOHO FLASH BEHIND HIM AS HE TRUDGES ALONG. A PLASTIC LEG WEARING A LACY STOCKING, STICKING OUT OF A SEX-SHOP WINDOW, KICKS HIM MECHANICALLY AS HE PASSES.

  2. INT Flat — half-hour later.

  MAN ENTERS LIVING ROOM GRUMPILY. LETS SHOPPING BAGS FALL OBLIVIOUSLY TO FLOOR. HE BECOMES IMMEDIATELY ABSORBED BY A BIT OF POETRY GLOWING ON HIS COMPUTER SCREEN. MAN STANDS STUPIDLY IN MIDDLE OF ROOM PONDERING OWN POEM. CLOSE-UP OF GROCERIES GRADUALLY CASCADING FROM BAGS ONTO FLOOR.

  KNOCK-KNOCK ON DOOR.

  MAN CRINGES, THEN RELUCTANTLY REACHES FOR DOOR. OPENS DOOR IMPATIENTLY.

  PLUMP BUBBLY WOMAN BEAMS AT HIM HUNGRILY.

  WOMAN

  (nervously)

  Oh, hello. I heard you come in. And I … I just

  wondered if you might like to have that cup of tea

  we keep talking about … Or are you too busy?

  MAN

  (helplessly)

  Well … no. OK. Sure.

  WOMAN

  (thrilled)

  Oh, super!

  WOMAN TWIRLS ROUND AND EXCITEDLY TAKES OFF DOWN CORRIDOR.

  MAN

  (aside to camera)

  ‘SUPER’?!

  CUT TO CLOSE-UP OF RED JUICES SEEPING FROM BAG INTO CARPET.

  This neighbor of mine has just wasted an hour of my time talking about a movie NEITHER OF US HAS SEEN. She considers that insufficient reason to SHUT UP. She considers this interruption of my LIFE insignificant. I could have been working! But the English have no respect for writing. It embarrasses them — something onanistic about it. WANKERS. Tell ’em you’re trying to write something and they invariably smile and scoff. Jeez, I’m used to reverence! Obeïsance! The writer is GOD in some remote parts of America … No wonder Jane Austen hid her stuff under blotting paper: didn’t want every philistine who happened to drop in to SCOFF. This is also why people write at night — before the scoffers get up.

  History of game, blah blah blah

  recent changes in rules, scoring system

  key positions, key players, etc.

  Crowds, chaos (WIFE)

  typical injuries (wife hit by puck in chest, my ear, etc.)

  skates (brand names?… get!)

  refreshments (before, during, AFTER)

  diff. types of ice (weather …)

  violence (MORE!)

  roaring sound, snow, driving home (parking-lot), donuts

  team loyalty (conflict, locker-room shenanigans)

  blood

  Been reading a book on what we did to the Indians: ‘The new nations of America will never take root in its soil until they … make reparation to the survivors of the holocaust that began five centuries ago.’ How DOES America live with itself? Just by FORGETTING itself? Like an incontinent old man: stinks but ain’t sure WHY.

  Glad I’m out of there. It’s so fucking big. A great Frankenstinian MISTAKE. Endless, and endlessly ruined. Raped and ransacked by men, NAMED by men. Who else could come up with names like ‘Dekalb’, ‘Denver’, ‘Irondale’, ‘Garson’, ‘Belcher’? Names to cheer the hearts of lonely bastards. Vestiges of the lost arcadia poke their heads out of the prairie like scared but plentiful gophers: Loogootee, Winnisquam, Chippewa, Beowawe, Milwaukee! Cincinnati, Mississippi, Catawba, Saskatchewan …

  A Californian Indian has just been given the summit of his ancestral mountain (a mining company gets to keep the rest). The summit is SIX INCHES HIGH. I guess he could put it on top of the TV set.

  I am able to read about this because I am sitting here like a jerk waiting for some ASSHOLE at the phone company to answer the fucking PHONE. He keeps palming me off with Vivaldi (yuk), his theme tune: all virtuoso whining and insipid climaxes. The record keeps slipping too, which adds to the suspense: will we make it to the next deafening orgasm before the guy gets back?

  Idiot on the radio today said that Bach’s work isn’t based on emotional principles like the Romantics’, it’s based on MATHEMATICAL principles. Jeez. There seems to be some kind of strange human compulsion to spout this bullshit about Bach at least once a week. The whole WORLD can be reduced to mathematics if one’s so inclined. Music is sex and emotion that’s what counts. ‘Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis’! All those unaccompanied CELLO suites … Mathematics my ass.

  … Catholicism extirpated thought and ushered in an efflorescence of music. The mind having been suppressed for centuries, Austria became the land of music. Having become a thoroughly mindless people during the centuries of Catholicism, I told Gambetti, we are now a thoroughly musical people. Having been driven out of our minds by Catholicism, we have allowed music to flourish. True, this has given us Mozart, Haydn, and Schubert, I said, yet I can’t applaud the fact that we have Mozart but have lost our minds, that we have Haydn but have forgotten how to think and given up trying, that we have Schubert but have become more or less brainless. No other country, I told Gambetti, has allowed the Catholic Church to rob it so unscrupulously of the faculty of thought, no other country has allowed itself to be decapitated, as it were, by Catholicism.

  Lot of women in Western Civ. seem to have teamed up with a cat and a cello in lonely ménages à trois. This is not as straightforward a fate as you might imagine. You have to start learning a string instrument pretty EARLY. How do all those little girls have the prescience to realize they’re going to end up alone and forgotten and in need of a huge human-shaped object to wedge between their legs? Do they know at ten they’ll someday be plodding despondently through adulthood? Which comes first, the cat-cello combo or the emotional void (the cat and the cello might put some men off)?

  Here I am in her country and not in her cunt. Maybe I should give Eloïse a call. But even if she REMEMBERS me she probably hasn’t forgiven me. Women never seem to understand how easily one can fall into being a bastard, just by trying to do the Right Thing! All my sins of obfuscation, prevarication, procrastination, fornication. What a jerk I was. ABSOLVE ME, Eloïse!

  All so long ago.

  Nothing graceful in this gliding.

  Blood and steam and sweat all BOUNCE off ice!

  Mad and monstrous mix of elements:

  Frozen water, noise and bustle,

  Bluntly spat-out exclamations:

  ‘Get ’im off me!’ … ‘Pass it to him!’

  ‘Crazy goddam no-count bastard!’

  So much instant ersatz hatred.

  THIS, America was built on,

  Hate is what my land is made of.

  We are nothing but usurpers:

  Mountains echo with our land-lust.

  We, the burglars of peaceful nations —

  Knifing chieftains bearing wampum!

  Tribes condemned to gradual slaughter:

  Smallpox did our killing for us.

  Maya, Aztec, Inca, Mohawk,

  Iroquois and Onondaga,

  Cherokee and Cayuga:

  Now they’re names of CARS not death throes.

  Archetypal ‘Indian-giver’,

  I usurped, I flatered (flattered).

  Gave my love and then retrieved it.

  Rifled through her land of longing,

  Left her with her reservations.

  Eloïse

  You want to fuck me? You want to? Fuck me with anything. Anything. Shove it in my mouth. Shove it down my throat. The sexual fever that wakes you from a dream of desperate masturbation, the search in the dream for some suitable object to appease the need, followed by the same search on waking. Needing a fuck, still in the dream of need, you stumble towards the bathroom, trying again — awake — to think of something that would serve the purpose. But nothing turns you on in that cold and silent bathroom. The shapes of the toothpaste tube, the moisturizer bottles, the ancient, slightly rusty hair-mousse canister, the dusty vitamin jars, even the dark blue rose-water bottle, are not it. You consider the possibility of a carrot but they’re all in the fridge and probably too small and too cold and too old. The cucumber’s gone soggy. Anyway, vegetables would require carving for ma
ximum effect and that would take too long. There is in fact nothing to make up for the absence of a human prick at this moment, that is all you want, you want all that. A wank on the bathroom floor isn’t it. But by now you’re coming down, waking up, and a practical side has emerged, a consoling side that counsels patience, postponement, nothing to be done tonight, it’ll have to wait till morning. You will have to find a mate, but in the morning. Or else a carrot. Until then the great urge will have to wait. You totter hack to bed like a sleepwalker, beginning to feel horrified now by the sudden power of that need, the lust your sexless existence has so well hidden from you that it can only erupt when you’re asleep. A huge impervious wave, with you its mermaid.

  … a fertile female bee …

  is an egg machine.

  On a scale of human suffering, Eloïse’s six years’ celibacy was of little account. But in an ideal world it would be recognized as the tragedy it was. This was a woman who from the age of five had suspected she wanted more sex than she would ever get.

  There were days when she was alive to the sexiness of every tree trunk, days when her cunt protruded beyond its accustomed zone searching for its counterpart, days when all men seemed sweet.

  Once, driving round a sharp bend on a hilly lane, she had to swerve to avoid a head-on collision with a white sports car. The other driver was smiling and for a moment Eloïse imagined his car accordioning into hers, flesh thwacked against flesh, the two of them fucking for a split second before they died. Died happy.

  But in general she had no libido anymore. She had watched her mother die lost, her father die angry, her old cat in her arms die all unknowing. And she had endured another loss that was like a death. She had seen how the body can let you down, she had no faith in it. Her own was an empty shell through which ghosts of thoughts and desires occasionally wandered.

  Worm shells, Ceriths, Sundials, Wentle-traps, Hairy

  shells, Cup-and-saucer limpets, Egg cowries, Necklace

  shells, Helmet shells, Frog shells, Fig shells, Strombs,

  Drupes.

  Eloïse became obsessed with mangoes, their kindly glowing colours, bonny, fleshy blobs. To be surrounded by those colours! A return to the womb? At one stage in her solitude she put them on the window sills (twenty at a time!) and revelled, with secret creeping happiness, in these slowly softening spheres, each its own sunset, and in each a flat skeletal stone to gnaw on.

  What happens if you have no hope? You slowly disintegrate. Eloïse got ailments to suit her current lifestyle: sizzled lips from sucking mangoes, heart pounding from sorrow and stagnation, nausea from eating standing up, piles from? sitting around?, spotty back from no hugging, atrophied cunt from no fucking, strange feeling in her throat from not speaking for days at a time, strained shoulders from dragging heavy things about, geriatric skin on her hands from having no good use for hands, and from too much washing. She washed her hands after going to the loo, before and after inserting tampons (toxic shock syndrome), before and after cooking, sometimes in between ingredients (E. coli bacteria), before and after eating, before and after washing up (during too, presumably), before and after writing a letter (clean paper; dirty ink), after unloading groceries, after taking out the rubbish, after shovelling coal or cat shit (toxoplasmosis), after feeding cats (salmonella), after handling smoke detectors (radioactive), after washing clothes, after hoovering, after being outside (tetanus).

  When her hands became uncomfortably rough (snagging on tights and wool) she started rubbing moisturizers into them. But moist hands attract dirt, thus leading to more washing. She was forever rubbing her hands with soap and oil, like a worried fishwife. It was one of the few sensual pleasures left to her – along with bending over the radio to marvel at the sounds human throats and tongues and lips can make, and walking in the wind. The wind encircled her, opened her coat, licked her tears.

  She was like an old woman who expects nothing. No rights on the earth. Her main worry: that some day a male nipple under a taut shirt would so entrance her she’d make a grab for it before she knew what she was doing.

  She got little crushes. She fell in love with her solicitor while he was handling her conveyancing (in fact she began to love him more than the house and was struck low when his secretary called instead of him to tell her the purchase was complete). Next it was the mover, whom she loved because he was careful with her stuff. Once she’d moved in, it was the gardener, not even her gardener but some neighbour’s gardener, a man who was never happier than when wearing protective clothing and destroying something. Then it was a local architect, come to study her thatched roof. Each time, another load of lipstick wasted.

  She fell so tumultuously in love with her moving-man that for a while she wondered if he was the love of her life! (She thought about him a good deal in her new bed in her new bedroom in her new house.) There was no obvious reason to love her moving-man except that he talked to her once in her dead parents’ kitchen for hours in the gathering dusk. But this was enough.

  He was in love with moving. He delighted in explaining the rudiments, followed by the finer intricacies, of moving. He spoke to her of three dimensions, the rightness of right angles, the squareness of the quintessential box — she made him repeat it all, just to listen to him talk. He tore at packing tape with his teeth like a lion, and demonstrated its strength by sticking some on his forearm, then ripping it off with a bold flourish. Oh, she didn’t know what he was demonstrating, she was just looking at that forearm.

  PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENON OF FALLING IN LOVE WITH ONE’S MOVER (’TRANSFERENCE’):

  Moving-man, meticulousness of; forearm of

  Proper construction of a box

  Rule that All Things Should Be In Boxes

  Exceptions to rule that All Things Should Be In Boxes:

  a) hoover

  b) floor lamps

  c) paintings

  d) unwieldy house plants

  e) cats

  f) cello

  g) rugs

  Packing procedure for dishes: upright

  Scale of charges: a) with packing materials

  b) without

  Legal redress in case of injury to:

  a) furniture

  b) mover

  c) movee

  Tearing tape with teeth

  Night he talked for hours in the darkening kitchen

  Character of said conversation, purportedly about moving

  His eyes (‘not my best feature’)

  His sense of: a) honour

  b) humour

  c) three dimensions

  He as the love of my life

  Particulars of piano removal

  His attitude to blocking neighbours’ garage (‘Fuck ’em!’)

  First mention of his wife

  Arrangement for collection of collapsed cardboard boxes

  She was alone, the days of her periods not noted, her successes and failures, her ailments, her longings, her leanings, her lists, her lethargy, her current address, the anniversary of her mother’s death, likewise her father’s, her birthdays, the years of her life passing unnoticed, unrecorded, life eddying by unseen. Everything that a man who loved her might have concerned himself with, not noticed.

  This is what it’s like to be an old woman. No wonder they give up the reproductive display.

  George

  Dumped out on the rowboat’s prow,

  She becomes a fish now, writhing,

  And I mount her, in defiance

  Of the Royal Edict, searching

  For an opening, a cloaca —

  Wondering if fish, like mermaids

  Hide a hole amid their scales.

  Round me in the waves swim naked

  Children, bare as dolphins, choking

  In the milk-green sea.

  Each man to himself an I-land,

  And on each a windswept longing

  To be loved.

  Of course my poem is all part of a self-inflicted and debilitating homesickness. I mourn.
Lately it’s taken the form of wanting to BAKE. I need to knead big white bulging buttocks of dough, need to see my braided chollah loaves, need to eat donuts made according to my father’s secret recipe (he got out of night duty in the Navy with those donuts), need to chew my black molasses bread, and sugar cookies, star-shaped.

  What I miss about my life then is the methodical nature of the baking process. Up at 4:00 to turn on the ovens and surround myself with warm rising mounds, my only worry: the age-old mysteries of yeast.

  Now I lie on an English couch like an English drag queen doing a lousy Elizabeth Barrett Browning impression, grousing about English layabouts (usually whilst guzzling Famous Grouse). My own fecklessness disgusts me. My famous CONFUSION. Half the crimes of the Nazis were carried out through inaction, people doin’ NUTTIN’: I’m perfectly cut out for that job. Especially on a Bank Holiday. What a boring name that is. Why not Weltschmerz Day, National Malingerers’ Day, Sexual Ambivalence Day, The Fucking Shops Are Shut Again Day?

  I never made silly bread like walnut and tamarind brioches or pumpernickel pretzels. That stuff’s for BORED bakers. Most exotic I ever got were the mango muffins I made for Eloïse. Useless muffled muffins.

  Let me tell you of our story,

  Of the now and never will be,

  Of the sorrow and the changes:

  How I loved her, loved and left her.

  See me take her, turn her, learn her,

  See me take her hands and lead her

  To the bed we shared that night.

  Leave us there upon the bed now,

  Trembling, awkward, stunned, delighted.

  Silence all her protestations,

  All her mournful lamentations.

  Close the circle of her questions.

  I marvel at the life I once led: bread, wife, hockey practice twice a week, creative-writing classes to teach in Salem, Beverly, Danvers and Newburyport … and none of it enough to contain me. Had to fall in love as well (writing to Eloïse when I should have been finishing my POEM). And even so, I was still obliging Ivy once a week. Ivy, who cooked herself roast beefs in the middle of the night and left the basement sauna on for three months running once because her skunk of an ex-husband was paying the bills. She had spirit — until she hit sixty, had a boob job and went all practical on me. Learning to be an old lady, I guess.