The Trouble with Bliss

by Douglas Light

“To us,” May says, lurching about Hattie’s apartment like a wounded deer. She raises her glass for a toast. “To the Skunks.” The stereo plays the soundtrack from Dr. Zhivago. “Lara’s Song.” May wears a new dress, a burnt orange one with the price tag still dangling from it. Six hundred and fourteen dollars, not including tax.

  “Fuck the Skunks,” Torc tells her, refilling her wine glass, a third of which spills to the floor. It’s their eighth bottle. May’s thrown up twice. They have no plans of stopping. “To you,” he says.

  “To me,” May says, swinging her glass.

  “No, to me,” Torc tells her, wiping his mouth with the hem of the dress he’s wearing. Red and flowing, it’s tight in the chest. But he likes the color, thought it went well with his eyes.

  “No, no,” May says. “No, we should toast Hattie,” she says. It’s Hattie’s wine, her dresses, her apartment.

  “Yes, Hattie,” he says. “Hattie, Hattie, Hattie.” He drinks straight from the bottle even though he has a full glass of wine in his other hand. They’ve used Hattie’s Jacuzzi tub, bubble bath, bath bombs, lotions, and perfumes. They’ve styled their hair, used her blow dryer, mousse, gel, and holding spritz. They've rifled her drawers, tried on her silk nightgowns, thong panties, and socks. They’ve eaten her cheeses, lox, carpaccio, and lemongrass capers. They’ve taken over her place.

  It’s now their place.

  Hattie gave it to them. At least for a day.

  When they saw her last night with the man in leather, they were overjoyed: it was Hattie, the Skunk leader, the one who held them together, the one they thought missing or dead.

  When they saw her last night with the man in leather, they were disappointed: it wasn’t Hattie. Not the Hattie they knew and respected and loved. This woman was just another person, another anybody who showered and didn’t have to defecate in the bushes when all the park toilets where closed.

  She was Hattie, but she wasn’t.

  She wasn’t a Skunk. She was clean.

  And she nearly walked right past them, walked by like they were nothing, no one. Like she didn’t know them.

  “Hattie,” Torc said. “Hattie,” he called when she and the man in leather had come flush with them.

  Hattie stopped, reluctantly turned to them. She seemed intimidated, frightened, like she didn’t know how to deal with her old comrades.

  “What’s happened to you?” May asked, repulsed and concerned, like she was seeing a diabetic sister for the first time since she’d had her leg amputated. “Something awful happened to you.”

  “She smells nice,” Torc said, sniffing at her. “Like she’s showered, cleaned up. Which is in violation of the Skunk manifesto.” Torc looked her over, like he’s calculating the best angle to take her by the jugular. “ ‘When the world stinks,’ ” he said, “ ‘we stink back twice as much.’ ”

  “Listen, man, you need to step down,” the man in the leather said, moving forward to defend Hattie.

  Hattie stopped him, placed her hand to his chest, said no.

  “Fellow Skunks,” Hattie said, her confidence somehow returned. Hattie Skunk, with all her brashness and self-assurances, returned. She took control. She handled the situation.

  She lied, masterfully.

  Placing a hand on May and Torc’s shoulders, she said, “I’ve gained retribution against the attackers. I’ve taken care of those who hurt my fellow Skunks.”

  “I wasn’t really hurt all that much,” May said. “A couple bruises on my—”

  “No one fucks with a Skunk,” Hattie said.

  “What’d you do, kill them?” Torc asked. Both he and May laughed.

  “Yeah, you cut their balls off?” May asked, grabbing her crotch.

  Hattie said nothing, her face a mask of seriousness, eyes shielded by silver sunglasses.

  Torc and May’s laughter waned, then petered to a stop. A ripe odor of spunk wafted off them. “You didn’t kill them, right?” Torc asked.

  Still, Hattie stood, unwavering.

  “Holy shit,” May said, “you killed them, didn’t you?”

  Hattie held them a moment longer. “When one fucks with a Skunk,” she slowly said, but didn’t finish. Then she added, “The cops are out for us. All of us. That’s why I’m in disguise. Best you both stay off the street.” She opened her purse, took out a set of keys, a roll of twenties. She hands both to May. “There’s a squat around the corner.” She gives them the address to her building. To Morris’s building. “I store stolen items there,” she said. “Go there, get off the street. Change your clothes, your hair. Make yourself look different. Normal. Then take the money and get out of town.”

  “What about the others?” May asked, her face showing profound respect. Hattie killed for us, she thought. No one’s ever killed for me.

  “The others,” Hattie said, “have been taken care of.”

  “You’ve killed them, too?” May asked. “You killed a fellow Skunk?”

  “Disloyalty holds a high price,” she said, smiling a smile far from friendly. “Go, and be quick,” she said. She and the man in leather strode off.

  Torc and May looked at each other, looked at the money and the keys, then looked at each other again. “You heard what she said,” Torc said. “Get off the street.”

  They stopped at Mr. Charlies and bought supplies for the night, four forty-ounce beers and two bags of stale corn chips, paid for it all with a new, crisp twenty, which they got no change for. But they didn’t care. They had cash.

  When they got to Hattie’s apartment, they dumped the cheap beer and snacks. Hattie had a full refrigerator, and bottles and bottles of wine with labels in French and Italian and other languages.

  They found a corkscrew and haven’t stopped.

  “I feel like a dancing queen,” Torc says, spinning about to the music. Wine spatters the floor in a circle.

  “You look like a drag queen,” May replies, feeling ill again. She sits with a thump. Torc reaches out his hand, lifts her back to her feet. “Dance with me,” he says, and twirls her about twice. She vomits on the couch.

  “Wow, not good,” she says between dry heaves.

  “But it’s vintage,” Torc says, not intervening. “The wine’s a vintage year.”

  “Aren’t all years vintage years?” she asks, staggering. “Okay, I’m good now,” she says, not looking so good. Her hair is mussed and frizzy, like she’s been sleeping in a cave, and her eyes are unfocused, glazed. She picks up the CD of the music playing. “Doctor Z-have-a-go,” she reads aloud. “What kind of doctor you think he is?” she asks. “What kind of name is that?”

  Torc waltzes up to her, runs his fingers down her breasts, places his hands to her groin. “A gynecologist,” he says, working her dress up off her hips.

  “With a name like that?” she asks, oblivious to his groping. “With a name like that, I’d think…I’d think he’d treat feet.”

  “Treat feet?” Torc says, his attention not on the conversation.

  May laughs. “Treat feet,” she says. “That sounds funny. Treat feet, treat feet,” she says, then starts chanting it over and again.

  “I’ve got a foot for you to treat,” Torc says, lifting his own dress.

  Seeing him in an aroused state, May laughs even harder. “That’s not a foot,” she says, drunkenly swatting at his genitals. “It’s not even six inches.”

  After forty seconds of fumbling foreplay, May’s bent over the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion chair with Torc addressing her from behind. “Texas, Torc,” she keeps saying, dazed. “I want to move to Texas. Buy some land. Have a family.”

  “Working on that last part,” Torc says, sweating profusely from his labors. “God, it’s hot.” Wiping his forehead with the palm of his hand, he shakes off the perspiration. “Open that window, would you?”

  May leans forward, slides open the window. Torc stays joined, waiting until she’s done.

  “A beautiful morning,” May says, staring out at the tree,
the street, the sky.

  Torc glances over her, out the window. “Yeah,” he says, “it is. It really is.”

  As they both gaze out at the morning, naked and conjoined, feeling the sweet breeze seep through the open window, feeling their futures changing for the better, the fiery blaze called Sofar shoots directly past them on his way down to the concrete. On his way out of his lease.