I Smell Esther Williams Read online

  CONNIE AND LESTER

  Connie and Lester are down by the well. Thick rolls of toadstools spring from its walls like the powdered curls of a colonial wig. Its floor is littered with shards and arrowheads.

  I still have the taste of chicken livers in my mouth, Lester says.

  Kiss me with your teeth, Lester.

  He steps back a few yards so as to get a running start.

  Spinning stripes … make a circle, Lester says, waving his towel like a lasso. He leaps at Connie, bowls her over, and bites her calf.

  Twice for luck, I say, and he clutches the other one like a drumstick and bites it.

  My ass is still stiff from Mass yesterday.

  Lester pokes his thumb through the cellophane bag of pistachio nuts, I love you more than anyone, he says.

  In the density of limbs and foliage, veils of shadow and oblong panes of sunlight partition the thicket into a thousand pieces.

  I think I’m coming down with something, Lester coughs.

  He points to a stump of flowering moss. To a dragonfly.

  The wind rustles the trees. Catch a falling leaf, Connie says, making herself dizzy.

  Lester’s got a first rate brain, Connie says, he can do two-thirds of nine without blinking and he’s a great phone conversationalist, she says, peering into the empty thermos, and stepping on a yellow jacket.

  Show them your tin cans and wire, Lester.

  Don’t be a stranger, Connie says tearfully, her arm lost to the elbow in a crystal bowl of raisinettes.

  Come out and see my car.

  She puts her bathrobe on and steps across the yard.

  There.

  It looks like an egg.

  See.

  It smells new.

  Listen to the engine, I say, turning the key.

  It sounds like a poète-maudit destined to die in shame.

  Don’t, I say, handing her a tissue.

  I think Lester really likes you, she says.

  The ground shakes.

  Tanks.

  I’ll tell him that …

  No, look. You can see their turrets through the trees.

  It’s getting …

  Don’t, I say.

  That night, the rebels begin shelling our village. Headlights fill the highway and rain splatters the windshields. Connie watches the windshield wipers and Lester listens to them hum until he slumps against a carton of canned goods and snores. Connie is ludicrously gorgeous in her pale wheat-colored maillot—her hair is chestnut brown, her eyes are fathomless. Lester too is ludicrously gorgeous in his pale wheat-colored maillot—his hair is chestnut brown, his eyes are closed. Connie counts one white line after another after another after another after another after another after another. There’ll be plenty of time for tennis when we reach the island, Roz says, we should sign up for a court on Wednesday for Thursday and on Thursday for Friday and on Friday for Saturday and on Saturday for Sunday and on Sunday for Monday and on Monday for Tuesday.…

  And on Tuesday for Wednesday? Lester asks, momentarily awake.

  Go to the head of the class, Connie says. She unpeels her third banana, let’s play a game—I’m thinking of a person … someone we all know.

  Is it me? Lester asks.

  Is it? I turn to Connie and break off a piece of her banana.

  The road conditions and traffic have brought us to a virtual standstill.

  A man unloading baskets, bags and livestock from the top of a bus gives us directions to a modest hotel.

  Next day, at the tourist information kiosk in the bus station, we are told to follow a boy who will take us to the rental agent.

  He has a creaky old red schwinn he rides every morning along the man-made inlets where people dock their catamarans and sunfish, where ducks in groups of three and four glide by, and he throws them pieces of Carr’s Table Water Crackers which are the most popular crackers on the island, and these rides every morning before most people have arisen make him tan and less burdened with a feeling of responsibility for the heart attack his father had when he withdrew from law school and moved in with two waiters/actors.

  We take a room in a boarding house on Bonnet Monkey Street. We can see through a hole into another room. Orange and yellow balloons are strung on the walls. Ribbon is strung from the light fixture and attached to something. It’s orange fluted ribbon. Don’t, says a man, pouring soda into paper cups. The woman lies on the couch wears fluffy blue slippers reads the newspaper. Habit, says the man. The woman is cleaning up paper plates. Some of the miniature plastic baskets still have hershey bars and fruit candies in them. These she collects. The woman leans back on a cushion she’s put on the floor and reads a thick novel.

  Lester: Look.

  Connie: Let’s eat.

  Lester: When? Now?

  The next night, I pack my suitcase.

  Roz thanks me for having driven everyone to the island.

  Connie and Lester are on the porch talking. They look particularly handsome this night.

  Do you see that thing over there? Connie asks Lester.

  I don’t.

  It looks like the thing you ate before.

  I can’t. I couldn’t have, Lester says.

  See that ceramic bulldog? Crouched by that basket of dried reeds? Next to it? That’s the head cardiologist at St. Barnabas

  I see them backwards. I have this kind of spatial strephosymbolia.

  Connie takes a rubber band off her wrist, and gathers her chestnut brown hair into a ponytail and doubles the elastic around it.

  August will be over in five seconds, I say.

  One.

  (Close-up of Connie’s face)

  Two.

  (Close-up of Lester’s face)

  Three.

  (Close-up of Connie’s face)

  Four.

  (Close-up of Lester’s face)

  Five.

  Moonlight breaks across the embrasure of the window. The tide is out. Connie and Lester have waded almost three hundred feet from the beach, and they are only in to their waists.

  TERRIBLE KINDNESSES

  (with Nova Pilbeam and Derrick de Marney)

  —May I take your coat, Miss Pilbeam?

  —Yes, thank you Mr. de Marney.

  —Please Miss Pilbeam, Derrick.

  —… Derrick.

  —Miss Pilbeam, I’d just like to say that I’m so terribly glad you could join us this evening. I know being thrust into the bosom of my family so suddenly must be terribly terribly bewildering and disconcerting, but they’re a congenial lot and I’m so sure they’ll take to you as I have, so be yourself and relax and I’m confident that you’ll acquit yourself most admirably.… Why Miss Pilbeam, you’re crying.

  —No … it’s just …

  —Yes you are. What’s the trouble dear, come come. Here, wipe your eyes with this and tell me what this is all about.

  —Thank you, Derrick … it’s … it’s just that no one’s ever been so … so kind to me before.

  —Really?

  —Yes. I … I was rather ill-treated as a child.

  —Ill-treated? Why … let me get you a brandy, dear. How would that be?

  —Oh thank you ever so kindly, Derrick … thank you ever … ever so kindly.

  THE GLOVE DEPARTMENT

  Here we are again. A pulsing monotonous breathing of accordions. A confluence of dyes.

  There is a kind of crystalline monumentality to the spots of peptides which lead like footprints down the forested mountainside to Lake Lugano where you have been brought by Sikorsky helicopter and I by Otis elevator, where a sprig of orange blossoms hovers weightlessly over your bosom, where penniless flâneurs and chess theoreticians in red berets writhe like storm clouds in this, the watery sector of the zodiac. There is a periodical wiping out of the impressions received on the visual projection cortex, but are you the anonymous friend who sent me a subscription to Ebony magazine on the anniversary of my hernia?

  The sun is still, like a butterfly hel
d in resin. The street is bordered by trees whose branches poke out like cocktail toothpicks. Listen. It sounds like the music a Russian would figure skate to. Sidewalk merchants sell boiled beets, chestnuts, and noodle soup, reason has been discarded in favor of ecstasy, and, like mice eating cheese in a cartoon, it registers deep in your mood ring. Like Napoleon, my pockets are stuffed with letters too foolish to send, but I have found aspects of your face among the brittle flakes of paint beneath this radiator, in tar pools of eolithic ax heads and stegadon bones, and in the frescoed boudoir of mr. and mrs. cork supplier. Here and there! Simpering like an organ grinder’s monkey. But tonight the lentissimo rhythms of our smoldering frames will rub away the past because you are my pink eraser, my integer with no factor except yourself and one, and I am the mischievous kitten toying within your petticoats.

  Here we are again, glued to the floor of a matinee, at the apiary, in the methedrine factory, in the lush breadfruit grove near Montego Bay where we curtsied like mechanical toys until dawn in a oceanfront cabana called the ancien-régime that was as accessible as Manhattan, that was like a display at Gimbels for swimwear, and even dummies have feelings, even marionettes complain of headaches, even porcelain geese have a vague sense of haplessness, even a glass of seltzer harbors a kind of festering “what if such and suchness”, so however one audits the figures, they add up, and the sum is a snowballing of coy, timid indiscretions, of pot-valiant audacity, of jammed broadcasts, of inadvertent breaches of confidence, of bungled trysts, unscrupulous geisha girls, and mislabeled blood types, so here we are, mio dolce amore, at the homecoming it took chains to secure.

  Before I go to the guillotine, I have one thing to say and though it may sound like it is a far far better thing I do than I have ever done, what I really mean is this, if your reserve of renewable energy sources dwindles dangerously low, burn these documents, this itinerary for dominoes, before you burn your bridge chairs, your diving board, your combustible scenery and if it annoys you, don’t swallow hormones and jump out a window like some kind of new yorker; but when, out of the corner of your eye, you mistook the red kinney shoes sign for the sunset, and rush hour traffic for the rio grande, the shot glass shook in my hand, and now in the dining car the air is thick with the chalky debris of this wobbling orbit and the slightest pang feels isometric and giddy and wanton like so many handfuls of hair, because I have drawn asbestos dust into my lungs and drunk the milk of michigan and dragged you out of an impending marriage for twelve hours in plain night.

  But now it’s just evening and you are a cure for ulcers, so would it turn you on more if I spilled this mug of chicken and stars down the front of your blouse or if I took a job in Trenton and called you every morning at four o’clock panting like this ahh ahhh whack smash ahh ahhh whack smash or if I sprayed your lanky and girlish nakedness with insecticide and lapped it up like a cockroach languidly grooming its legs, because I’ll do it darling, I’ll do it you knock-kneed big-toothed rebecca of up-state new york, we can guzzle manischewitz concord grape and make it grand guignol style … just look around, we don’t have much time, the night is a map with pins in it, the yokels are washing their children against rocks at the stream and refusing to send their laundry to public school.

  Are you as weak as I am and do you need a drink or is this a foreign place more terrible because of its mysterious and regular occurrence or an empty savage custom bouncing a basket on its buttocks or are you trembling are you as weak as I am because here a river of fresh water runs out of the sea into a dark cavern because the fish have no color and breed in your pipes like eyes in the darkness and there is in those small piercing eyes an expression which no painter can render or because retroactively you are beginning to feel the advantages of steady self-denial and to experience the pleasures of property? I am not trembling because I don’t know if the lips of your vagina are flesh or rouge and dough but are you trembling because I am trembling because I’ve been bathing with horns or rubbing clay into my wet yarn because like Dürer I have portrayed St. Michael fighting the dragon in a shower of diarrhea because I have used you without adequate ventilation?

  Oh, night of the underprivileged whites. The noise of you gulping maalox woke me from a dream about soaking your sister-in-law in epsom salts and though your sister-in-law is not an intellectual at least she can pronounce her own name correctly, but to you, every eastern-european name is a kind of genito-urinary metaphor. You are fiercely heterosexual and well-formed, and it’s no one’s business that you’ve shrunk your parents and keep them in a terrarium, but you have a gatling gun for a mouth, and if that’s a diary you’re producing from your cleavage, I’m leaving. Who are you staring at—not that broad-shouldered svengali with soccer players do it better on his t-shirt? Could I interrupt your intratrachial injection of venom for a moment, or were you just going to the 7-11 for a slurpy in your crotchless suit of quills and steel-tipped espadrilles? Oh, if I could woo you for just a second, I would weaken you with blandishments and ply you with images of the soft life, of cucumber canapes and baked quince and firm Damson plums in port wine, of liveried chauffeurs and sandblasted gargoyles, of binding our neighbors in garlands of pigeons and searing them over bathtubs of blazing brandy, of ice-fishing in our quilted parkas with small bore pistols and geiger counters, and you’re saying it, oh god your mouth is on my pussy, I’m making you say it as if it’s a line on the teleprompter, oh god your mouth is on my pussy, and it’s so terrifically fraudulent, it’s so terrifically fraudulent—so much like mate in one move, like astroturf, like marzipan lungs, and this sensation of falling through a glass trampoline gives me an urgent hard-on.