I Smell Esther Williams Read online

  Acclaim for

  MARK LEYNER

  “Reading [Leyner’s] books is like watching a blend of ‘Saturday Night Live’ and ‘Monty Python’; they have the energy and insouciance of high-risk, off-the-wall performance.”

  —Washington Post

  “With a prose style blending near-hallucinatory self-exploration, gonzo journalism, hard-boiled detective fiction, existential despair and cyberpunk super-realism, novelist Mark Leyner has been likened to Franz Kafka on speed or Hunter Thompson on Valium.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Most current fiction is as well made and exciting as floral wallpaper; but here is a writer willing to decorate the room with the contents of his own dynamited head.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Leyner is … the writer for the MTV Generation, the spiritual stepson of William Burroughs and Lenny Bruce, only with a high tech sheen.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “[Leyner’s] contemporary Joycean, Hunter Thompson-on-who-knows-what, stream-of-consciousness sort of way … can be perverse without being pornographic, erotic in an almost surreal way … delightfully inventive.”

  —The New York Times

  Books by MARK LEYNER

  I Smell Esther Williams

  My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

  Et Tu, Babe

  Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog

  FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, FEBRUARY 1995

  Copyright © 1983 by Mark Leyner

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division

  of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by

  Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by the

  Fiction Collective, Boulder, in 1983.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines in which

  some of these stories first appeared: Chicago Review for “Launch”; Afterthought

  Magazine for “I’m Writing About Sally”;

  Mississippi Mud for “Connie and Lester” and

  “Octogenarians Die in Crash”; and Eat It Alive for

  “Pangs in the P.M.” and “The Spin Cycle.”

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Leyner, Mark.

  I smell Esther Williams : and other stories / Mark Leyner.

  — 1st Vintage Contemporaries edition.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81960-4

  1. Humorous stories, American. I. Title.

  PS3562.E99I2 1995

  813’.54—dc20

  94–31359

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  LAUNCH

  UNTITLED

  A BEDTIME STORY FOR MY WIFE

  CONNIE AND LESTER

  TERRIBLE KINDNESSES

  (with Nova Pilbeam and Derrick de Marney)

  THE GLOVE DEPARTMENT

  THE TAO OF BEING WHITE

  HE HAD ONE OF THOSE AROOOOOOGA HORNS ON HIS CAR

  ANOTHER CITIZEN’S HOLIDAY

  MEMORIA IN AETERNA

  THE YOUNG AMERICAN POETS

  BLUE DODGE

  UNTITLED

  I’M WRITING ABOUT SALLY

  OCTOGENARIANS DIE IN CRASH

  I SMELL ESTHER WILLIAMS

  PERSONAL PAGE

  “LA VIDA”

  PANGS IN THE P.M.

  HISTORICAL PLAYS: Sides A and B

  THE RIVER

  THE BOAT SHOW

  PROSE POEM / A JOKE FOR GINGER

  KING PLEASURE’S MOOD / A FABLE FOR LAURA

  UNTITLED / A LULLABY FOR SHARON

  THE SPIN CYCLE

  LAUNCH

  I’ve given the raft with the woman you’ve been waiting for a little push so you should be receiving her any day now. She has a very deep cleavage like liz taylor. You may have to thaw her out. She is dead like I am.

  I am doing my impersonation of the new jersey shore. I, of course, am lying on my side and masturbating into a bedpan that I’ve banged into a likeness of deep cleavage. If the costa rican nurse touches my nipple, I tell her that the nipple is the living room of a run-down two-family house by the sea. If she puts her eiderdown electron-image tubes to both my nipples and only if she shows me her shiny gold molars and sings Tengo Cabanga Por Mi Patria, I tell her that two escaped convicts from the woman’s house of detention are in the living room, pulling taffy and watching a television show with the sound off, and if she brings me seconds for lunch when chicken fried steak is served, I pretend that they are snorting thick lines of crystal speed, and I promise her jewelry. If she draws a picture of what she thinks the raft woman’s ass would look like projected on a drive-in movie screen without lifting her pencil from the paper, I open the living room door and mr. and mrs. hogan, a couple from philadelphia, enter and I pull her dress up over my head and we hypnotize each other and pretend that we have no control over what we say or do. If it is late at night, we pretend that we have lost the right to vote and that we have been sterilized by missionaries. We pretend that we have cut the moorings and let the raft drift away, that we are exiled on an island for savage morons.

  The woman who I’m sending knows all about you. We have spent many nights reminiscing about you and laughing about your ingenuous kindnesses and social clumsiness. She is impressed by your poems and surmises that, as a child, you must have been force fed like farm poultry. Of course she is drifting very peaceably now right towards you. It’s a fine sunny day. She and the raft look marvelous, rocking in the tide. She is doing her impersonation of an automobile showroom. You would enjoy it very much. She, of course, is lying on her back and the sun is glistening against all her automobiles, her sedans, her squared-off economy models, her red convertibles. If she draws a thin piece of kelp across the inner part of her thigh, like a bow across a violin string, you can hear all your favorite buddy holly songs. I, of course, am on my knees, peering through an antique vasco da gama spyglass, watching her revolve in momentary eddies. I too am enjoying her uncanny impersonation of an automobile showroom. If the nurse brings me a fat pungent smelling costa rican cigar, I pretend that I am a newspaper boy in a vintage 1930’s style newspaper boy’s cap. If she takes off her starched white nurse’s cap, unfastens her bobby pins and lets her luxurious black tresses fall into my eyes, I enter the automobile showroom and yell, extra! extra! yeshiva boy slays showgirl whale swallows mob kingpin bald cure called hoax mets split! She in turn impersonates mrs. hogan. I think we want fifteen automobiles! she says, Look how fast my husband is! Mr. hogan runs from car to car spinning the plates he’s balanced on each antenna. Of course she’s drifting towards you now! She is coming to you of her own volition. Do not let that disturb you. It was, in large part, her idea. Oh, look. The raft has a nice teakwood desk. She is writing a letter. She will either put the letter in a bottle and throw it at me or save it for you. At the end of the letter, after recapitulating the ups and downs of her epically repressed life, she writes, p.s., I want the second movement of mozart’s piano concerto in b flat major played at my funeral. She begins to lose weight. I enter a room where people are frantically pacing back and forth. Everyone thinks I look negro, I say. I am, of course, dying. I’ve placed two hundred dollars on furrowed brow in the sixth at aqueduct for you. She will be exhausted when she reaches you. She will be almost dead. My life is over. The nurse is doing her impersonation of an afternoon in bethesda, maryland. I pretend that I am a house. When she gives me a blowjob, I tell her that someone in the house is doing yoga exercises and that
someone is painting the maid’s room institution-green. The woman I’m sending you has taken off her bathing suit top. You will like her breasts very much. She is doing her famous impression of someone who takes three hours to eat a teaspoon of potato salad. The nurse says that mr. hogan is in a deep trance now. King me. Checkmate. Gin, he says. The bed is masquerading as the sauna at seton hall university. A young man named theo enters. Let’s go down on each other, he says. My nurse is playing the role of a girl with very beautiful red pubic hair. You’re not the most subtle guy in the world, she says. He bites her stomach. Yum! she says, Your whiskers are like porcupine quills. My father’s pizzeria is the best in new jersey, he says. Oooooo! she says, You’re clever, too! The costa rican nurse, who, admittedly, represents a repressed feral idealization of my mother, collapses to the floor and does her impersonation of a molting boa constrictor.

  I am skipping smooth flattened stones in the direction of the drifting raft. I am trying to get the woman’s attention. She is now a shape. A nude chiaroscuro set in relief against the horizon. I cup my hands and yell, I was sitting in the library when I first heard two members of the parnassian society whispering your name back and forth. Remember? There were only two books in the entire library that hadn’t been taken out—Portable Power Tools by leo macdonnell and.… The Penicillin Man by john rowland, she calls out to me. I begin to weep because she has remembered. There are some things, she calls out, that a woman never forgets. I pretend that the cliff rising above the dark water is a lovers’ leap. We jump. She is doing her impersonation of a woman who has jumped before. The raft is disappearing now.

  My life is over. It has been over for months now. I am sending this woman to you partly because we have preyed on each other’s consciences far too long, and partly because you are my only friend and this is the woman you have been waiting for, for so many years. She is dead like I am. You too will be dead soon. When she arrives, do not mince words. Do not pretend with her.

  UNTITLED

  Stalking from place mat to place mat in a livid dudgeon. A voice skating beneath the exposed heat units, the new architecture of relationships with its freed russet scaffolding and its exigent separations, halves across the continent, elastic couples with gummy attenuating arms reaching across the midwest, different weathers.

  Last night was my best lie, integrity peeled like an adhesive price tag. Then there was a violently styled adjudication, a kind of slapstick justice. A trial by pies.

  You’ll notice the foliage, the bus fumes, the heavy matronly arms reeling in the clothes-line of condoms. It’s so Secaucus-like. So unreal. So unpleasant. It’s impossible to prognosticate. The metastasis of feeling. The crossing of state lines. Apprehension finally.

  It’ll be nice seeing you again. What’s passed. Tense is an inhalation that’s held and finally released into a moment that is itself a darkening ember. The tub is filled with passing ships, a horizon of canary towels. A mirage of hips, a series of cosmopolitan glyphs, a brush that needs brushing. Strawberries springing from the tile’s crevices where once only mouldy grout festered, and the ample closet space filled with its magazines and its ideas.

  It’s three in the tire place across from the arena, lines of leaves divide the street, the schools are emptying out, you’re trying on boots and saying something and thinking of momentous things, the boots and boxes and stools and tissue paper, the offal of staunch consumerism, stores are closing early today, the proprietor plans on buying a can of fancy soup like oyster stew and a magnum of wine, you’re waiting for what, for who, the proprietor holds the door for you, you walk past the tire place and I knock against the glass, alerting squads of Cupids in the arena’s parapets, and the variety of twangs from their released bowstrings is like a sudden diapason of desire, and everything vanishes then but a feeling of regret about everything, the water cooler gurgles, lug wrenches and hubcaps enter the ark, closing time is upon the tired place. Outside is the world with its tremendous trap, that we ourselves, with unflagging industry, have baited. We catch ourselves thinking this way. Sitting nervously, thinking this way.

  A BEDTIME STORY FOR

  MY WIFE

  The clock on the Hudson City Savings Bank billboard says 6:30, indicating nothing but the hands’ exhaustion—it was so thrilling five minutes ago & now that seems like another life, when all the cars accelerated down Newark Avenue like they’d lost their brakes and some of the passengers, some of the women, craned their necks in the wind and their religious medals pulled against their necks and were held rigid in the draft of the wind and the dashboard saints bared their teeth to this speed and the sky went vermillion and then purple and then deep blue and then black like four blinks of the eye and the clock’s hands just fell limp … and you wondered who out there was thinking of us, who in those houses, each with its own private radio wave, each with its own esoteric policy and testament, yellowing, friable, in some vanity case or hope chest—who out there was sitting by their phone waiting for our call, for our opinion on this evening that, like a kind of curettage, had cleaned away all feeling for what preceded it.… And here I am, bivouacked beneath the dangling plaster of your family’s ceiling, aghast in anticipation of their exotically emetic cuisine. The things that don’t matter here wouldn’t matter anywhere unless the mattering was too too basic to be located exclusively anywhere or here, I guess. But what the fuck could that mean? There are photographs everywhere, (soldiers barbering each other in long elephant chains, gowns and mortarboards, & a cabin and outboard in the Adirondacks (?) circa ’49, golf caps, sunbonnets, stubbly white legs in bermuda shorts, fuchsia toenails)—and one seems to say, drop your buggy whip, and the next, take up the reins of finance. So how can a wistful harlequin in water color or a walnut stock blunderbuss above a mantelpiece or the deep suspicion that bridge is played here every week provide solutions to problems that aren’t even “interesting”? I bore myself on this seat. Tedium is consumable but even its monotony wears thin. Seventy-five percent of life won’t go away; fifteen percent of the time it has something to do with a dentist or a deity; and above the din of the remaining ten percent we can hear ourselves say, it’s simply more exquisite to remember having done the things than to work oneself into a lather doing them—to illuminate our hats, than to requarry the emerald mine.… (So we sat. And snacked. And they spoke.)…. What does your mother see through her eccentric pince-nez? The atmospheric disturbance is insoluble and vast. A vast plain that hangs in the air. And your sister. What could she see in that bulvon with his indelible I-just-had-root-canal face?…. My! Is this the miasma of a ruined abbey or the passed wind of a mystery man or simple stink in vehement affirmation? Or is this the fume of a cauterized bride that bites at my nostril as it had that morn on the Portuguese Costa del Sol to whose shore I fled when John Q. Nation gnashed its moral pimento loaf of conscription vs. scramming? World full of whack and silent discharge! Ah! Unmistakable prelude to more of the same! (Is it Michelle who shaves her lap?) I quietly collated several entries into conversation, discarding the bloom of the family endive patch and the inability of Wallace Simpson to wane in private for something topical, something political. “There are a lot of wooden nickels in circulation,” I noted during a lull, revealing no partisan inclination.… And I caught a glimpse of brother-in-law whose curt, eructed expressions of disapproval were promptly reinterpreted by spouse or child and the combination of so much translation with this variety of baleful ogling made it all seem like the weigh-in for a Santo Domingan prize fight, and the clang of the dinner bell struck me as particularly apropros. Unaccustomed, as I was, to large families and their tendency to stampede, I found myself, perforce, left to seek the third floor bathroom, between whose dingy walls, the excavational capacities of a single light bulb had unearthed the wads of fungus, the tufts of phlegm and hair, and the clammy goop-covered potsherds that indicate an ancient and intractable civilization of slobs … but through whose window I can now observe the moon … the moon, the bilingual marquees, the fit
ful movement, the newspapers in the wind, Magda’s pillowcase and girdle, the cantilevered window boxes of anemone and myrtle, and the bridge which gently spans the Hudson like an iron hammock.… I’m not of this clan. “The raw turbot soaked in kirsch and fresh dill that you didn’t have was out of this world.” What do they mean—didn’t have? I had it. And later: “Beattie and Iredell notwithstanding, Blair was the most fascinating, the most disturbing individual with whom I’ve ever been personally acquainted. ‘There,’ I can still picture him saying, (indicating with a hand over his heart some belief or another), ‘we shall sit side by side upon life’s long piano bench whilst you turn the pages and I render the most sublime strains and our souls, crowned with vine leaves, dance that rite of unyielding fidelity, and if ever the faintest bubble of adultery rises from my pipe, remove my appendix without ether.’ ” The unfurled banner, the hail of trumpets: Smug and torpid husbands, (the call is collect, see?), I’ve come for your wives—your infinitely more interesting wives. Go back to your books. Oh! To kiss their mouths, under your noses. To feel their nipples swell between my lips, under your noses. To brush my cheek past the warm soft flesh of their navels, right under your noses. To lap the tart juices and meat of their veiny petals, right under your noses! Back to your texts, gentle husbands. To your fusty codex!.… “Buck is off to drill for oil … Bye Buck.” “Bye Buck … so you’ll be free for awhile?” “I feel weird without Buck,” she said. “Forget your world of woes,” I suggested, shaking spit from my horn, “Buck’s a dick. He’s no brother of mine.”…. And that woman, with her Ceylonese mask and paprika-dusted apron, draws on the blackboard which her admonitions invariably conjure before one’s eyes, that “thin line between recreational gossip and basest schadenfreude”…. Ah, danke schön, mother—but our neurotic ground sloths, Hansel and Gretel, have been locked in the Plymouth all afternoon and the windows are barely cracked and the vinyl must be broiling after two hours in the Dekalb Avenue sun.… I can hear the mealworms gargling in the UPS truck that’s burst into flames and flipped across the bright privet hedge that borders the lodge hall. The custodian, his thick tongue swathed in flypaper, peeks out from behind the venetian blinds. I can see the lodge hall without my glasses—it is so crisply focused—a kind of Valhalla made of dentures and prosthetic limbs.… I reclarified, for your father, the circumstances behind our decision to marry: “See, me and my friends were out a few nights ago. We drunk about thirty bottles of Colt 45 each y’know and drove around for awhile, fucked some girls and vomited on them and we didn’t say goodbye to them when we left either. We didn’t have no jobs so.… Then I choked one of my friends to death by stuffin gravel and dog shit down his throat while everybody kicked his balls in—it was a pisser—then when I got home my mother was suckin some dago’s cock so I grabbed a beer and lied down on the couch and watched her for awhile—soon I crashed. I was dreamin a lot—mostly of fuckin girls or just rippin their shirts off and squeezin their tits and stuff—but then I had this real funny dream—your daughter’s in white and everything—they’re playin Here Comes the Bride—I’m puttin a ring on her finger—so I wake up and say to myself, it’s time—marry her, man—it’s a sign, y’know”…. Ah, what is durable and authentic? Not gardens dug up to fill sandbags. Or barricades built of hatracks. Not the meadowlark’s final bubble surfacing in a cask of Armagnac brandy. The world seems miniscule. A dolls’ house. In lederhosen and tyrolean hats, we’ve ascended its stoop and crushed the Queen Anne furniture with our stupendous behinds. But you must return with me to assay the damage. We can wed our culpability this way. Wherever you go, you sense some wrongdoing that, like the imprint of a signet ring on the victim’s temple, slowly vanishes under the inspector’s magnifying glass. Then you feel your heart pounding once more and the hoofbeats of a blue ox seem to echo again throughout some hinterland you remember. Though perhaps nothing could ever seem as alien and as disquieting and as alluring as the sepia bluish-limned photographs of headhunters and tourniquets that one found in antique encyclopedias or as abiding in memory and dream as the severe glare of that attic patriarch with his ashen and bifurcated rabbinical beard.… I am less and less different from you, and you from that. Is this my way of saying—let’s consolidate as a people? We are a people, you and I, whose history can only begin back there—day after day. And the pleasure will be retroactive—and vast.… So I said, get your coat on. Or you told me to put mine on. And put one sleeve at a time on! I’ll try it on, I said. Then we argued. I couldn’t even get the coat on—because the coat wasn’t even mine. The sleeves were blocked up with old crusty tissues that an uncle of yours had squirreled away for a thousand years, but I capitulated because history teaches that every Napoleon has his Waterloo and here, in front of all these faces, was mine. I’m almost positive I heard someone say that I was a faggot who’d look better with an altarboy’s surplice pulled over my head as I’m flagellated across the bare ass with a scourge of rats’ tails and intestinal worms—but I may have imagined that. And I may have imagined this too, but I thought you said that I was a terrible lover, that I needed a map from the AAA to make love. And then I said, you’re not marked by stately beauty, yourself. And you put a very flammable substance down the front of my trousers and I tried to represent words with frantic gestures & your relatives guessed Under The Volcano, The Carpetbaggers. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, Naked and Fiery Forms, No Time For Sergeants, and The Three Faces of Eve. And as quickly as it had erupted, the argument was no more. Though you’ve defoliated my tinea cruris for good, pet, our reserves for toll booths and road house vittles (a b.l.t. at the Pilgrim would suit me well) are bankrupt. But I love you. I love you. And I need you. And I’ll never leave you.… And here we are. Now it is evening again. We are riding again. On mammoth steeds. Our outlines motionless in the chintz crepuscular moonlight, propped in tandem leaps across the vacant avenue and clock, like painted figurines. You look plump and pissed-off and I’m a little nauseous & the horses seem old and complacent and bored as if all was right, right on schedule and nothing beyond the horizon of this daily to and fro … the “excuse our citadel’s appearance—we’re recarpeting the parapets” sign looks perfect, mr. total’s heirs are snug in their royal compound near Bernardsville, the nursery is quiet, where all conceits bear the imprint of the constellations the pennant’s locked up, the traitors headless, the throne reupholstered … there is the sound of transit but never the sensation of movement … the unknowable unnameable is vigilant.… but let’s be honest, are we not flung from the earth as it spins—and is this not a kind of sleep? Ah!!