“How much rain did we get last night?” he asked.
“I have no idea.”
“Not enough, not enough. I sure hope it rains some more.”
Since I didn’t look worried about the submoisture of Iowa soil—I had enough worries about my own submoisture—the old man scrutinized me, and, concluding I was an alien, asked, “How long are you staying here?”
“Half an hour longer, just passing through,” I said.
“Oh, that’s too bad. Our town is small, but we got some things worth seeing—the most beautiful courthouse in the whole state of Iowa. Its interior is paneled in polished oak. Just beautiful.” His voice had become gruff with patriotism. “But of course, you wouldn’t have seen that.”
I stood up, shaking hands with the fellow drunk for about half a minute. With the sensation of welcome, I climbed onto a steely bus, where about a dozen babies screamed for milk (or, maybe, for beer and speed).
Through the tinted glass, before the I-80 exit, I beheld quite a sight. A mobile home lay over a crushed pickup. An intact gray snowmobile stood beside them, like a faithful dog waiting for its drunk master to get up from the ditch.
OBSESSION
WHEN ROSE HUGGED her husband one early evening, she smelled Obsession perfume in his beard. She slid out of his embrace.
“You look out of sorts,” David said. “Would seeing The Unbearable Lightness of Being at the Pacific Arts Theater cheer you up?”
After the scene where a wife discovers her husband’s infidelity by the perfidious perfume in his hair, David cleared his throat. Searching for his hand, hers bumped against his hard-on—after a sultry scene—proving to Rose that he lusted for other women. Now it was certain: one plus one. From a seat next to hers, a young man’s knee protruded, touching hers, first lightly and then firmly and warmly. She withdrew her knee but felt the neighbor’s knee inching toward her as a threat, a threat the man seemed to hide from her, and she from the man and from her husband.
The following morning, however, she could not concentrate on her therapy clients. A young man, a philosophy student, told her he would kill himself because nothingness was the source of being. The philosophical solution to the problem of existence was nonexistence—to the problem of life, death. And what is the psychological solution? he asked. Love, she answered. What a cliche! he responded.
That evening her husband remarked that since she seemed melancholy again, they should go out. A friend of his from college, a Cuban exile and painter, had just called from Saratoga, and invited them for an evening.
Ricardo welcomed them at the door in a bright yellow shirt with red and purple canaries. He cooked brook trout, seasoned with garlic and butter. Rose relished the garlic while David tried to extract bits of it from the fish. “Aren’t WASPs terrible—scared of garlic!” Rose exclaimed.
David had brought along French red wines that made your tongue and gums contract as if you were chewing coca leaves somewhere in the Andes. Once all three blushed from the wine—they had no fear of blushing from conversation, so they retold bawdy jokes. What did the elephant say when he saw Adam? “I wonder how the poor thing feeds himself”—was the mildest.
When night came, beyond glass sliding doors, orange light bulbs turned the patio into a stage, announcing a feast to a tribe of short-legged raccoons. Rose put half of her fish through the door, though she had just praised the fish’s succulence. Ricardo moaned that his culinary masterpiece should go to the vile band of robbers. Raccoons gnarled at each other, like large and selfish felines.
Ricardo asked the Thompsons how they’d met. In college, David was attracted by Rose’s ballet-trained grace. David borrowed from friends, relatives, and banks. He drove Rose in a Jaguar to string quartets at the symphony hall. In his room, he played CDs when hardly anybody had heard of them yet. Her parents were impressed by him until they realized that he neither had nor would have serious money. David soon made good money as a car dealer, and then better as a real estate broker. She liked him—his style, his ambition, his speedy driving, his humor. She thought she loved him.
Now David bragged to Ricardo about his moneymaking schemes and elegant vacations. “Rose, we must revisit Venice, the most wonderful city on earth.”
“I love how artfully gaudy it is,” Rose said. “Ricardo, have you been to Venice?”
“The whole city is a colossal antique,” said David.
“Venice is the asshole of Italy, riding on rotting wood,” Ricardo said. “Why does half of Italy look like a desert? Because Venetians cut down most of the trees.”
“The city is unbelievable,” David said. “I’m going to take tons of photographs there. Would you like to write a book on Venice with me?” David asked Rose and played with her hair, pulling it behind her ear.
“Why don’t you go to Venice with us?” Rose suggested, looking only at Ricardo. “It’s nice to be with friends. We are less than a nuclear family, we are only a certified couple.”
Luxuriously tipsy, Ricardo leaned back in his chair and said, “David, you are incredibly lucky to be married to such a beautiful woman.” He drew a smoke out of his aromatic pipe. “You wouldn’t mind posing as a female magician?”
The following Wednesday, Rose’s day off, before they would again meet up for dinner, David dropped Rose off so she could take a swim in Ricardo’s pool while David went back to work for a couple of hours. Because of her injury—a car had smashed into her Toyota, breaking her arm—swimming was beneficial for her. Ricardo came out and swam too. She lay offering herself to the Sun, whose rays licked her so that her bronze body glistened, seal-tight; her skin’s fuzz of miniature sensors, she felt, could receive a touch without her skin being touched. The sensors felt Ricardo’s gaze. She stretched her arms self-consciously, arching her back a little above her hips; her muscles tightened so that the cast of light shifted, dancing on her skin. She opened her blue eyes suddenly, startling Ricardo.
Flirting is a wonderful thing, she thought. It sharpens your senses.
Ricardo invited her to watch a documentary about India: wives cremating themselves alive after their husbands died. Just as she walked out of the house, David, out of breath, ran into the garden, although it was before five.
“You rush as though you don’t trust us. And yet several days ago you reeked of perfume!”
Ricardo walked out too, and David said to him, “Let’s move the party to our place on Piedmont. Some friends of mine are back in town just for the evening.”
In the duplex, David informed the party of ten what a bad year it had been for the French vineyards; fortunately, David had wines from the good old days. Rose sat next to Ricardo, while David sat at the opposite end of the table. When somebody mentioned massage, Ricardo said he could give the best backrubs.
“Really?” said Rose. “I wish David would give me a backrub, but he just doesn’t care for it. Can you really give good back-rubs?”
“The best in the county.”
“I don’t believe it! Prove it!”
She nudged him with her elbow and pulled her blond hair in front of her, baring her neck and upper back, her shoulder blades. The music of Muddy Waters was loud, and so was the party’s laughter. Ricardo’s thumbs worked close to her spine, his fingertips on her pulsating back. Ricardo squeezed her muscles, trying to follow their contours, roll them, press between them. His cool fingers made her shiver. “You are right, I’ve never had a better one!…agh…so good!”
The conversations ceased. From the corner of her eye, through her eyelashes, Rose saw that David was trying to look nonchalant, and that people looked at her, David, and Ricardo, as if to figure out who was married to whom.
Ricardo’s fingers stiffened, and she felt a slight tremor. He stopped.
Flushed, she openly stared into Ricardo’s eyes. She gulped wine.
Someone proposed an ice cream run. Rose stood up, wishing to go, and asked Ricardo, “Are you going?”
“No.”
“Then I’m not g
oing either.”
“Actually, I think I’ll go,” Ricardo said.
“Then I’ll go too.”
In the car, Rose and Ricardo were pushed against each other in the dark. Ricardo sat stiffly. Hot tingles ran through her skin.
Back at the duplex with vanilla and pecan, Ricardo sat on the floor close to a fish aquarium, away from the husband and wife, gazing at the scarlet fish gliding slowly as if they were sad, and perhaps they were, in their jail of glass. People sat on the floor and talked about insiders trading secrets. Inevitably, David began to talk about buying real estate in southern France. He drank more wine than usual; Rose had never seen him so drunk. Serves him right, screwing behind my back. At least I am honest about my flirting.
David called Ricardo to the bedroom and showed him a collection of ten thousand French corks, with squeezed purple tips, beneath his bed in a pirate crate. “You dream better with this stuff beneath you.” From among the corks, David drew an antique gun and pointed it at Ricardo. “It works,” he said, clicked it, and put it back.
On the wall in the bedroom hung photographs of Rose. In one picture Eric Clapton embraced her, his hand resting on her breast. She leaned her head against his neck.
“The Cream guy? I thought he was a born-again Christian!”
“It’s him!” said David. “It was taken a couple of years ago on a cruise.”
In the doorway, Rose laughed. “He likes to show it to everybody, as if it were something to be proud of. That was before I met David.”
“How was he?” Ricardo asked.
“What do you mean, how was he?” she said.
“Was he a good conversationalist?”
“He was very quiet.”
David embraced Rose in the same way as the man in the picture. “Isn’t she a precious darling?”
Rose walked out into the garden, where she overheard their conversation through the open window.
“You really are a good friend,” David said. “It’s always fun to see you.”
“Now,” Ricardo said, “you may have thought there was something between Rose and me. I would never do anything because she is your wife and we are friends. Actually, I am sure she would have controlled herself too if I had made a pass—I could have made a pass with her hanging around the pool so much.”
Rose did not like how they congratulated each other on being good friends—over her. Swollen egos! Probably many a husband wants to see his wife draw men, particularly men who are close to him in opinion, confirming his good taste. Perhaps all David wanted to see between Ricardo and Rose was a genuine desire in Ricardo’s eyes. But not in hers.
The next morning, David and Rose had hangovers. David canceled his appointments. Rose could delay going to the office; her first client would come at one.
Her hair in a towel, she tiptoed out of the bathroom to the living room. David was closing a women’s fashion magazine—it had just arrived in the mail—and awkwardly walking away from it.
“I didn’t know you read women’s magazines!” she said.
“I don’t, but it’s tempting to see the new fashions.”
She hugged him, burying her nose in his beard. Scents of Obsession frolicked.
“Hum.” She took the magazine, and when she opened it a strong stream of Obsession hit her.
She examined the last month’s fashion magazines, and on a black surface, she saw greasy fingerprints, circles. Later, before she went to work, she clasped and pulled her husband’s hand toward her lips as though to kiss it. She examined his fingertips: the lines formed circles. She thought she had caught him cheating, and probably he had only read the slicks. But why would he? To gaze at beautiful models?
At work she got a call from the parents of the philosophy student. He had killed himself. He stole a BMW and drove east, pushing semis off the road. He drove straight at the semis until he collided with one. She brooded, feeling guilty, although she knew that a suicide usually made everybody who knew him feel guilty.
At home, she ignored David. Instead of trusting him more after solving the mystery of the Obsession, she mistrusted him more: he was a liar. He even lied about not reading women’s magazines. He had pretended to be rich before marriage. He cheated on his taxes. And she trusted herself even less. Ever since she believed that he cheated, she felt erotically obsessed. Was revenge erotic? She daydreamed about gentle sex, extra-sensory sex, unlike the rushed athletic sex with David. Shouldn’t she experience it? Before marriage, she had slept with only two boys.
She rented a mailbox in a downtown coffee shop and put an ad in The Guardian. Sensuous fun-loving blonde looking for an imaginative brute for discreet meetings.
One reply especially intrigued her, not by what it said, but by how—on a laser printer in Letter Gothic. Not many people used that font; her husband liked it in personal correspondence. Of course, the font did not prove that Alexis Schwartzberg was in fact David Thompson. But her husband’s printer tended to blur the seventh line of the text, and in this letter, the seventh line was blurred. That was too much to be a coincidence. Should she confront him? How would he believe that she had never placed a personal? Maybe they could meet and pretend that they did not know each other. She remembered a story from Laughable Loves by Kundera. A husband and wife pretend that they don’t know each other. The wife hitchhikes, the husband picks her up, and they have a wonderful time as strangers getting to know each other. But suspicion that they could easily do something like this with strangers and be unfaithful alienates them. They realize that they are strangers. With the ad, what story would he give her? He would lie. So why bother confronting him? Clearly, he’d like to have an affair.
For a while, she recorded his odometer readings every day and tallied his accounts of where he went with the factual distances—ever greater and greater.
After a couple of weeks, she gave up and proposed that they take a vacation. She refused to go to Venice. She needed something wilder, something less theatrical.
They went to Peru. From a hot springs pool Rose and David gazed at the snow-capped Huascarán as if the sight of ice would refresh them. Embracing, they floated.
Outside the pool, as David rubbed coconut oil into her back, Rose talked. “You know, that peak used to be taller. But twenty years ago, an earthquake cut a chunk of the glacial tip, and the melting ice and rocks killed ten thousand people in Yungay in the foothills. And ten years ago, an earthquake shook a glacier off its top—see, the ice cap is flat—and a torrent of ice, water, and rocks crushed the town of Yungay, killing some thirty thousand people. The peak is now about one hundred feet lower than twenty years ago; at 22,205 feet, it’s still the second highest peak in South America, and for that matter, in the Southern Hemisphere.”
“You read all this in a guidebook? How do you remember the exact elevation?”
“Once you hear it, you cannot forget it—twotwotwo-oh-five.” “Your neck muscles are pretty tight. Does the town still exist?”
“Yes, people rebuilt it.”
“How many people live in it?”
“I don’t know—about forty thousand.”
“You mean, you don’t know the exact number? Not 43,419 or something?”
“No, I am afraid not.” Rose chuckled, intertwining her fingers with his behind her back.
He kissed her ear, pretending to insert his canines into her earring holes.
“What are you doing? It tickles, ah, hurts! Stop it!”
“Don’t you want me to be your earring?”
“Maybe the rest of you, but not your teeth!”
“You know the best thing about our marriage is that we have so much fun—we’ve built it on fun!”
Now Rose traced acupunctural meridians on his back, pressing her sharp nails. She found a spot on his back that, when pressed, made his foot twitch. “And you say I need to relax?” She laughed, a clear laugh that made him laugh too.
Sitting on the steps in the water, groggy from the steam, David went on: “Too bad we
have to wear bathing suits. The hell with them.”
“But the natives are clothed,” Rose said. “You mustn’t be insensitive to their customs.”
She recalled impressions from three days before—straw huts on the Titicaca Lake, a tourist boat, a young Italian woman sitting opposite from them, her serene emerald eyes beneath thin black eyebrows in a face of clear lines, and full, wavy, calligraphic lips—she didn’t blink, staring at David. Her clear features cut an indelible etching in Rose’s eyes, an etching uncalled for. Although she couldn’t recreate the fresh hue of her eyes, she saw her face clearly. David had stared at the Italian.
“What are you thinking?” David asked.
“Nothing. I can’t possibly think in this heat.”
“How old were you when you had your ears pierced, anyway?”
“Six. I didn’t want them pierced, but my mother couldn’t pass up a deal. At a supermarket, although I fought tooth and claw, she had me tied into the chair, and my ears were pierced at a forty percent discount. She said I’d thank her later. And…”
A crew of loud British archaeologists arrived so that David couldn’t possibly hear what Rose further said.
“They are enlightened Europeans,” David said. “If they skinny dip, we can too.”
“They won’t. Do you want to bet?”
The crew got in almost in full apparel—jean shorts and shirts. David was distracted by their darkened teeth.
Next, a crew of guttural Dutch tourists came to the pool, and before Rose and David could bet, a bunch of naked bodies flip-flopped above them, and glistening wet breasts, buttocks, and balls floated on the water as though filled with air. David followed suit.
Rose said, “You are a born conformist.”
“And you are a prude. Relax! Look how beautiful it is here.”
“If I am such a prude, why do you keep track of the exact miles it takes me to go shopping? Or to work? You think I haven’t noticed?”
Honey in the Carcase Page 3