Honey in the Carcase

by Josip Novakovich

  “So how do you know it spoke about mountains? And how were the stories funny if you did not understand them?”

  “Hhhhh…hhhh…Bogdan told me it saw the mountains. He could translate Austrian. He translated some stories for me.”

  “So you must know many things about Austria?”

  “Not really. Bogdan translated into Slovenian, and I could not understand Slovenian very well. He laughed so I knew the stories were funny. Anyway, I put the cloud into a matchbox to bring it to you—you know, the way our father keeps queen bees in matchboxes when there are more than one in a beehive. Now and then I opened the matchbox to see our princess cloud and to listen to Austrian. It could not stop talking. I began to trust that we were good friends and opened the box a little too much so that the cloud could see our town with me from the hills, you know, from behind the V curve of the Doljani Hill. The cloud jumped up from the box and out through the window. It went higher and higher into the sky, made several circles above the train, and I couldn’t see it anymore. I hope it did not get lost. The sky is big.”

  My brother stared at me.

  “At least I saw it and you did not!” I exclaimed in triumph. My brother’s mouth was now open.

  “I wanted to bring it to you. You could have listened to Austrian, too. It would have taught us Austrian. What a pity! What a pity.

  “That’s not all! I wish you could have been there! Even in the summer, there is plenty of snow in the Alps. You could ski. They have electric skis. If only you saw how quick they are!”

  Since I wished to avoid explaining how the electric skis worked, I went on:

  “But that is still nothing. They have jet skis! You can go uphill with them more quickly than you can go downhill with your rotten planks of wood!

  “I fell down a cliff two thousand meters high! I fell only fifteen feet before I caught a raspberry bush.” As evidence I showed my palms with fresh scratches from Slovenian rocks and a scar from the kitchen knife of my hosts.

  “It is true, what our minister says happens before death. You see all your life in a second. I saw all my life in that small second, all the sins I had committed. It was in color. Every sin, every stealing, slandering of parents, having idols, all the bad thoughts I had, and all false testimonies! Wonderful! If you want to see yours, jump off the roof!”

  As my brother stared at me with his mouth agape, I was happy. Now I am not sure whether he stared at me so because he was surprised that his younger brother was able to lie so shamelessly, or because he truly believed me. Either way, he did not jump off the roof.

  PEAK EXPERIENCES

  AT A SOHO PUB, David hosted a reunion of his friends from college. At midnight he stood up, and after crashing a glass of wine on the floor, delivered a toast of sorts: “You are all cowards and I am ashamed to have friends like you!” He over-turned the heavy oak table around which they were seated. Pitchers of beer, jugs of Diet Coke, and glasses of wine crashed to the floor. David stormed out of the pub, leaving behind his stunned wife and friends—musicologists, musicians, and assistant professors of mathematics. He muttered, “What a bunch of wimps, drinking Coke! Shitheads, they are scared to relax and celebrate!”

  The following morning, with a pulsating headache, he called up his friends, one by one, and apologized. “I’m sorry; I’d looked forward to seeing you so much, and I was just disappointed that it was so quiet. I had vodka before getting there, and…”

  But apologies were not necessary. Nobody took offense. It quickly became an anecdote to David’s credit: though David had betrayed his college-days’ ambitions of becoming a pianist and mathematician, he’d remained real.

  And to be fully real, self-actualized—and not because he thought he was in trouble—he started seeing a therapist, a woman decorated with Ivy League degrees and the authorship of a how-to book on self-control. Dr. Fisher. Her first question to him was, “What is your earliest memory?”

  “I tried to bury my face in my mother’s breasts. She pushed me away. I guess I was about three years old. I know I was only two months old when I was weaned.”

  “Do you feel your dearest ones often reject you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Or do you reject them?’

  “No need for either. We live in different cities.” He recounted a brief autobiography: a foreign-service brat, born in a taxicab in Italy, a child prodigy. Mother, an alcoholic journalist with imminent deadlines; father, demoted from a diplomatic post to a university professorship. His voice deepened as he recounted that his father had lung cancer.

  “How about love?” she asked. “What was your first real love?”

  “When I was seventeen, at a New Year’s Eve party, somebody introduced me to a girl I’d had a crush on for years. We shook hands and she smiled. That’s all I remember of it. Next afternoon, a couple of my friends congratulated me. ‘What for?’ I asked, and they laughed. ‘Don’t play dumb, you know damn well what for.’ Apparently, after she and I shook hands, we kissed and half an hour later we made love. In my drunken blackout, I remembered nothing of it!”

  “Incredible, isn’t it?”

  “I’d thought that sleeping with her would be the highest point of my life. I felt sorry that I had missed my most important experience. I thought of quitting drinking. But then, it’s such a good feeling—”

  “You can relax more constructively.” She rolled her neck and lifted her shoulders in such a way that her breasts roundly faced him. The graceful cure of her neck continued to her chin. He had an urge to bite her neck.

  “So now where do you stand with love?’

  “Of course, I love my wife.”

  “The way you rush in with ‘of course’ makes it suspect. Or maybe you do and you don’t know it. Or you nurture crushes you hope you’ll realize one day in a showdown, another blackout, so that you’ll be safe from love. Since you drink habitually—we won’t say that you are an alcoholic, but you may be—you’ve frozen your personality at the stage of development where you began to drink. In other words, if it was at seventeen that you began to drink, you are psychologically seventeen years old. So you are likely to flirt and constantly have crushes: something constructive at seventeen, but destructive at twenty-seven, especially since you are married.”

  As David listened to her, with a tremulous cowlick rising from his shiny round forehead, his hazel eyes sunny-side up, full lips parted, teeth milky white, he looked much younger than seventeen.

  Usually she didn’t talk that much.

  At home David fantasized about his therapist. His wife, Beatrice, was of course enough for him. She was wonderfully virtuous. For example, after her mother’s death, she took over caring for her mother’s nine cats. Six healthy ones she managed to give away, but three unhealthy ones, which nobody wanted, she kept. She nurtured a white tomcat who had suffered a stroke; he had no sense of distance, so that though he saw his food, his tongue and teeth missed it. He had to be spoon-fed. You couldn’t pet him without him going into the tic of trying to bite his right foot off. Another, an asthmatic Russian Blue, coughed and wheezed and had watery eyes. The third cat died of feline leukemia, but not before Beatrice had spent about two thousand dollars in vet bills. To David there was something spooky about her cats, but he didn’t have the heart to press her to get rid of them.

  Beatrice had earned a B.F.A in violin from the New England Conservatory. She had gone on to study at the Paris Conservatory, but she quit. The strenuous practices seemed to her mechanical, militaristic, and dehumanizing; she had sought love in music, and in cruel perfectionism she did not find it. So she began to yearn to organize a family, the arena of love.

  After marrying David, she couldn’t give birth to a child. She underwent many medical exams, but David refused to be subjected to the humiliation of having his sperm counted. He claimed, “The money count, nor the sperm count, is what matters if you want to have a kid. Wait till we save enough.”

  Beatrice gave music lessons part time a
nd continued to play music for love. Though not ambitious, she auditioned for the Hartford Symphony; the conductor offered her a place as first violin. She did not want a full engagement, so she subbed for the orchestra instead—quite frequently. She minded that her husband was so busy at work that he had no time for family. And when he had time, he was drunk. Now and then she knocked with her knuckles against his rib cage and said, “Open up!”

  One midnight David tried to call his therapist. After her husband hung up on him, David called again and asked for Dr. Fisher.

  “I must see you right now,” David said to her; she yawned.

  “Why?”

  “My father killed himself.”

  Ten minutes later, they met in her office.

  “You know, through the mail he ordered a book in French about how to kill yourself in the safest way: how not to run the risk of survival. When I visited him, we read the book, chapter by chapter, and laughed. I didn’t think he’d do it. When his cancer got worse, I thought he would become religious or something. But he didn’t. He liked living without hope, or at least he gave that impression. He said, to make sure that he would kill himself, he would inject poison into his veins, lie down on the tracks before an oncoming train, and shoot his brains out—triple assurance.

  “Last night, on the phone, he said that he had gone to the hospital Laundromat and a patient flashed his wound at him. The patient had tried to shoot through his heart, missed, and had a huge scar that he liked to share with people.”

  “Only one in three hundred attempts of suicide by shooting through the heart is successful. Isn’t it amazing that people don’t know where their hearts are—and if they do, that they cannot reach them?” Dr. Fisher offered him the solace of statistics and wonder.

  A day later, the conversation continued in a restaurant with candlelight—as if his father were laid on the table. In a muted voice, David spoke with the authority of death.

  “I visited his home in Watertown. After his divorce, my father changed nothing in the house, so it was as I knew it in my childhood, like a museum. I could follow his steps from the entrance to the laundry room. In the living room, he folded his raincoat over a chair, leaned his walking stick against it, and put his black hat in the middle of the varnished round table. I…I…you…well, everything of his was there, his character, but he wasn’t. His clothes were still wet in the washer. He never got to put them in the dryer. He fired through his brain. The bullet made a hole in the reproduction of Botticelli’s Venus, above Venus; his brown blood splashed over Venus and the shell on which she’s shyly standing.”

  David’s eyes shone and he smiled. A bit of red lobster sauce was on his cheek. Dr. Fisher—Laura—lifted the crumpled white napkin from her lap and, wiping his cheek, whispered: “Incredible, isn’t it?” She hadn’t interrupted him until now. “You almost relish each graphic detail, don’t you?”

  She returned the greasy napkin to her silky evening dress. David, his cheek tingling, wondered whether the sauce would soak into her dress. What a peculiarity it is that good manners demand that you should wipe the grease from your lips, and then that you put the greasy napkin on your best clothes. Wouldn’t it be cleaner to put the napkin on the table? He wiped his lips and folded the napkin neatly in a square.

  “I guess I do. Life is strange; I expect death to be stranger. Anyway, I have an important question. Should I see his body before it’s burnt to ashes and flung to the four winds?”

  “What do you think? You have to decide.” When he answered nothing but only stared at her feverishly, she continued: “It’s risky. It might be something that will haunt you for the rest of your life. Or it might help you concretize your father being dead so that you can grieve it all out. Hard to tell. Depends on how much courage you have.”

  “That sounds like a challenge.”

  Nearly every night, David dreamed his father’s emaciated body was floating in his room, blood spreading over the white head bandage and dripping onto green embers on the floor, with steam coming out of the ashes.

  He began to drink heavily, put on weight, and was so inattentive at work that he was laid off. To top it off, Laura announced that she was moving to Stamford, Connecticut, where she would work for a hospital. David decided to follow her. He did not have enough money to afford the move and the high rent around Stamford. So he sold his Steinway piano, the dearest possession he had.

  He used to dream of becoming another Glenn Gould, playing nothing but the divine harmonies of Bach. With highest recommendations for the master’s program in piano performance at Juilliard, David had prepared his audition by smoking pot to soothe his nerves. It didn’t work. Tense and paranoid, he sweated while performing Brahms’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini; the keys kept sliding away from his cold fingers, and so did the lines of musical thoughts. Instead of the theme of Paganini, the recurring melody and voice in his head was Mick Jagger’s “Sympathy for the Devil.” He failed to qualify, and it was then that he decided to pursue the practical path of applied math, to become an accountant, dealing with numbers and machines and not with that pompous European geriatric inquisition, classical pianists.

  After being laid off, David was unemployed for a year; he was in a sort of hibernation, except when he saw Dr. Laura Fisher, which made him liven up for several hours. He gave her presents: an Egyptian mummified cat, which he had stolen from his grandmother on her deathbed, and the first edition of Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann in Gothic print.

  Then David got an excellent job with Prudential Insurance in Stamford. The employment gave him an aura of self-confidence and success. He put on more weight, which on the surface didn’t bother him (though it made his skin sweat so that he got in the habit of wiping his forehead with his jacket sleeves). He liked discussing his future with Laura. In ten years, he would be making more than a hundred grand a year. Then he would be able to relax, play the piano, and in a manly way support his wife so that she wouldn’t have to work, but could chirp like a bird in a lush tree. In twenty years, with wise investments, he could retire and spend half the year in Katmandu, and the other half in Stamford. In thirty years….She encouraged him to talk and did not make judgmental comments.

  His new well-being, however, ran aground. Dr. Laura Fisher announced that she was moving again, this time to Tokyo to open a private practice for American businesspeople. She had family connections and many friends there; she could quickly establish her practice.

  “But I won’t be able to see you!” David exclaimed.

  “We can stay in touch.” Laura fidgeted in her armchair.

  “I won’t be able to find another therapist as good as you.”

  “Don’t worry, you will. Unfortunately, the time’s up.” She stood up.

  “Please, I’d just like to say something important—” He stammered, and she sat down again and crossed her legs. He tried to hide that he was staring at her legs. She uncrossed them, and crossed them again.

  “Well?” she asked.

  He looked at her beseechingly and said: “I could move to Tokyo. They need insurance too, with all those earthquakes and tsunamis.”

  “No, that would be too much. There’s too much transference here. You have to be on your own. I cannot hold your hands.”

  He literally wanted to hold her hands. “So, you are just going to leave? It’s so easy for you? After all we’ve been through.”

  “Don’t be childish. I enjoyed working with you. I learned a lot. But now I must go!”

  She stood up and walked past him. Her skirt brushed against his shirt in passing, with a spark of static electricity. She walked out of the office, opened the door to the corridor, and waited for him to leave. He stared at her radiant silhouette against the darkness of the corridor; her green feline eyes shone, fascinatingly elusive. She was beyond him. He could not have her. He had humiliated himself. He had tried to appear strong, and he had tried to appear weaker than he was, he had tried to be real, he had tried to be fake. He hurried out of
the office, cheeks flushed, and wished to kiss her naturally crimson lips—it would be so natural—but did not kiss them.

  At home David drank a whole little barrel of Dinkelacker beer. It was the equivalent of two and a half six-packs in cute packaging, tasting like bitter honey. The neighbors played the stereo loudly; the bass shook the walls, and David resented it. His wife was not home yet though it was 11 p.m. Her violin rehearsals were supposed to be over at eight. Well, let her. I don’t care what she does.

  When she walked in, she laughed at him. “You are pathetic. Drunk again? Don’t you know that each glass of booze is an invitation to the devil to be your companion? He might refuse one invitation, but not a dozen.”

  “Where did you get that pearl of peasant wisdom?”

  “How can you drink so much? Don’t you know you are too fat?”

  “Too fat for what? I’m as I please.”

  “How can you be so stupid? Tomorrow you’ll complain of a headache.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “I thought I did. It’s nearly twelve o’clock.”

  “Where were you?”

  “I had a cup of coffee with the timpanist. It was fun. He has a crush on me.”

  “Really?”

  “I like him too.”

  “So you want to leave me? Go ahead! I don’t care!”

  “I know.”

  “No, I care.” He flung the freezer open and poured himself a shot of pepper vodka. “Just to cork up the beer.”

  “Just to cork up your mind, so you don’t have to think.”

  “I’ve had enough of your smartass comments. All you do is criticize me.”

  “Since you don’t have enough self-criticism, somebody’s got to do it. And what good is your therapist? You pay her a hundred bucks an hour, and she doesn’t criticize you, apparently. It’s amazing that though you think only of yourself, you haven’t discovered anything smarter to do than get wasted.”