ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

FETCH | BACK TO PAGE 1 | PAGE 2 |

When your affection is a fog on the quicksilver of your lover's mirror, when you are both an old man and a blind beagle in the blue dusk of a Philly fall, when you are the one thing and another thing in search of a third thing, when the sweet green promise of love takes effect, you are not the ideal party guest. You are in fact a lousy party guest, made lousier by the acute awareness that you are aware of your acute awareness. So it was when I walked up to the row house full of broad bursts of laughter and whoops and the monotonous thumping of some retro disco tune. So it was when I walked into the party where the guests were howling over the ironic finger food—artifacts from the seventies—saltines with cheese wiz, Juju beans, and Chick-sticks—and talking about the quotidian. I stopped somewhere in the vicinity of the front door. Somewhere in the vicinity of the front door, Jeaneane was hidden in what smelled to be Kenneth's aftershave. I could hear her, the unmistakable idiosyncrasies of her teetering. I stood for a second awkwardly, elbowed this and that way, the breeze of a cool Philly fall at my back, beckoning. I considered running away, but Judy spotted me, waved. I smiled. I gestured to the right and the left of the tightly packed and vaguely undulating crowd. I shrugged. She smiled and dived back into a conversation with a guy with Buddy Holly glasses.

I stood awkwardly on the verge of leaving. I stood in the doorway, a cool breeze behind me, a wall of beer breath in front. I thought about leaving. I was ready to leave. I would have left, but I spotted it.

The chair. A chair with an outstanding, a lovely curvature. A half-hidden chair just on the other side of two groves of people. I caught a glimpse of it. I caught another. How nice it looked, coyly exposed.

I wove my way through the gesticulations, the dancing, the heaved beers. I walked through the sweat and laughter. When I finally found my way to the chair, I sat. I felt the curve of my spine, the gently undulating of this belle époque rip-off. The fatness. The sumptuousness of it. The lovely it of it.

Jeaneane appeared, a beer in hand.

I remembered when she was in charge of breads and I was in charge of the rest. I had perfected pork chops, had a great recipe for meatloaf. I knew how to bake a chicken stuffed with wild rice, currents and carrots and cilantro, roasted over a few oiled garlic cloves. She would get the dessert from one of the little bike truck iceboxes, peddled noiselessly by one of the beautiful young Guatemalans. It was always a coconut cream bar: ice up top, cream in the middle, and coconut shavings at the base near the stick. She liked to talk about the change from a little tin box, how it was cold in your palm.

"What a cunt," she shouted. She took the beer back and took a sip. "What?" she asked.

"What do you think about this chair?"

"You've got little burn blisters on your cheek," she shouted. "What about it?"

"We should get some chairs like this."

"What?"

"Chairs, we should get a chair just like this." I swept the chair with my hand. She moved in closely, her warm oaty breath gliding across my cheek.

"Our co-purchases are over," she said. "The beer was an unparalleled act of kindness. It means nothing." She stood the music stopped. "Have you ever noticed Judy's breath? Old southern woman breath..."

"She's young and she's from the east coast."

"Tell that to her breath," she said, walking away into a joke about Pam Anderson's breasts.

Professor Kenneth Price, Joycian, the University of New Dehli: ...poor Bloom: "Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper...No great hurry. Keep it a bit...Our prize tidbit...Quietly he read, restraining himself...yielding but resisting...his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently... Hope it's not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah!" Bloom and his one little Ah! —His one brief passion, the muffled antithesis to his wife's great and flaming, twenty page, "Yes!" is the unwitting proponent of a modern day monasticism...

I sat in the chair. My chair! While the guests came and went, while some Smith guy's wife passed out on the couch. I watched Kenneth talking to my wife; Kenneth must have said something funny. Something worth touching him over, because my wife, my lovely wife— We lived in a rented house and, sitting on the front porch in the rain. We sat on the porch waiting for the rain. The day would go black and suddenly, when the cloud had dropped, the light would come back, refracted, incandescent, like a camera flash, then the water down the gutters, and later the finches picking through the stewed ruins, when it was silent. Besides the rent, was the rain— was laughing with tears. Funny Kenneth. Kissable Kenneth.

And then there was the taste of after-shave in my mouth and Kenneth suggesting that maybe I go home.

"Home?"

"I think you've had too much to drink, man."

"Man."

"I'll give you a lift and then I'll pick you up in the morning and take you down to the Oregon Diner for something greasy and sweet."

"What do you think of the curvature of this chair? The dainty feet. Like something else I've never seen."

"Did you get a hold of something? I mean are you on something?"

"Your wife's medication."

"Maybe you want to run that by her. Maybe you want to devastate her. That's a very poisonous comment to make about someone whose food you were eating only a week ago."

Jeaneane once told me a story about a plane ride she took—about a man she was sitting next to—about his mustache really—this itty-bitty mustache that was so pitiful—that prophesied a small, mean life that would end on the down hill slope of his trip to New Orleans or Cancun or some equally preposterous occasion to get unseemly obliterated—to become invisible. Invincible. He was drunk. And in love with his mustache. And Jeaneane—sober—was in love with the way he was in love with his mustache. She had an overwhelming urge to fuck his mustache. It occurred to me that that man's mustache was on Kenneth's face.

The week before, he was sitting on the stoop of his house tying and untying his sneakers, the mustache washed and wet and glistening in the morning sunlight. I said, "I never told you this. Tax time. I was looking for an accountant. And somehow in looking for an Accountant.... You know: Accountancy. Accordions."

"In the yellow pages? I don't believe it. Only a child looks for an accountant in the yellow pages."

"Accessories. Accordions. Abortion. Abortion. I never knew that Abortion would be listed. I thought: How strange. How utterly appalling. How strangely nonchalant. I mean, for the record...What?"

He said, "Nothing."

"What?"

"Nothing." He was stretching now and I was talking to his rump.

"Where was I?"

He said, "Accountancy, Accessory..." He lifted a leg onto the third stair leading to his row house and grabbed his other ankle.

"Right. I thought okay, fine. It's a little crass. So, I figure what the fuck, I'll thumb through the pages. This is kind of interesting. One more hurdle between my taxes and me. And as I'm thumbing through the pages. What do I find? Calculations. Little mathematical figures. Number's circled. Little doodles. Little notes written out to the side. I never knew. She never said a thing."

"I don't get it."

"It was her hand writing."

"Oh..."

"Yeah."

"How do you know?"

"I know."

"How do you know you know?"

"They were her doodles. This particular variety of doodle that is unmistakably hers," I said.

"Maybe she was doing a little research. For a friend," he said. He was on his back on the sidewalk, his legs flipped over his head.

"It was her salary, minus the abortion. Six fifty-eight minus two thirty. Six fifty-eight minus two twenty-five, etc. etc."

He stood. "Was this in Houston or Philadelphia?"

"What's that?" I wanted to know.

"The thing. Was it here or Philly? Is this a new or old thing, is what I'm asking." He was so alert, he was so at attention, and his little shoes were tied just so right. He was jogging in place.

"It was here," I said. "Philly. About a week, a week and a half ago."

"Oh," he said. "Oh." He took off down the dirty street, through the traffic and into Philadelphia. He ran right in front of one of those little two door Continentals. And before I could figure out what happened you know what direction to jog after him, he had disappeared, just like he disappeared right then and there at his own party, mid conversation, into his own odor...

Judy arrived from a conversation with the Johnson's, who were trying to explain why they had named one kid Jett and one kid Buick. She sat on the corner of my chair. She said, "I feel like vomiting. If I hadn't eaten all of that cake earlier and made myself sick, I would throw up on this floor right now."

"Hmm." I said.

"We had to kennel Rufus. And for what? So your wife could flirt with my husband. The fact that I have to listen to what's her name talk at all..."

"Steen."

"Steen. Exactly." She was staring across the dance floor to a small circle of talkers, Kenneth and Jeaneane included. She said, "I can't stand to see the way they look at each other. Look. She touched his elbow. You're so right. She's a real elbow toucher, isn't she?

"It's just a pattern," I said. "It's just a way of thinking. You can get used to it. You can replace it with another pattern. I bet you had a high school boyfriend."

"You are truly fucking useless...I can't say I really blame her for leaving you, but Kenneth..."

"When's the last time you thought about your high school boyfriend?"

"Kenneth was my high school boyfriend."

I sat in my belle époque buddy thinking of Kenneth as the high school friend. Young Kenneth, full of easy laughter and vague ambitions. He said he once ran a six-minute mile—the single greatest thing I have ever done. He was across the room, drinking, a round red swaying face suspended in the nice patterns stitched into the new sweaters. He had opened like a wet rose as the party went along. A dozen or so drinks into the party the bloom in his cheeks had become a sort of happy rage. He felt my stare, met it with an ambiguous smile. He ducked his head and made his way through the sweaters.

We were sitting on the porch in Houston, a low sky falling around the rose stems across the street. The newspapers at our feet ruffled by a heavy gray breeze, eating oranges.

"What if I were going to have a baby?" she asked.

"A baby?"

"Hypothetically."

"What if?"

"Hypothetically. Or not. Hypothetically. I'm pregnant. Baby? No baby? What do y' say?"

"No baby."

"No baby?"

"It's not in the budget."

"What budget?"

"Exactly."

He was a round red swaying face, emerging from a cluster of patterned cardigans, saying: "You." Drunk and beaming and breathing through his mouth. "You," he said. "That was very. That was. I am impressed. It was very upsetting. Touché. I'm drunk. Please tell me to shut up. NO? Okay. It was very upsetting. But I deserved it. I really did. After all I'm sleeping with your wife. Very regularly, I might add. It's only natural." He grabbed my shoulder with a warm slippery hand and said: "Look. No hard feelings."

"None," I said.

"It couldn't be helped. Really. No bullshit. I never believed in that. But trust me it couldn't."

"No."

"I tried to help it."

"Yes."

"But it couldn't."

"No."

"And I like you. A lot. Your friendship. We should really sort this out."

"Yes."

"If she wasn't such ball bashing cunt, I'd give you my wife. Fair is fair."

"Fair is fair."

"I'm not greedy."

"No."

"And I really like you."

"Yes," I said.

He was a long ways off, way over there a little head bobbing on someone's shoulder, laughing into his drink, his right eye over the rim, during a long and thoughtful sip out of the flimsy clear plastic Budweiser cup. I couldn't even begin to tell you what the clear liquid in the cup with the lime slice was. "It's just a good thing there weren't any kids," he said and glided across the room straight over to the distant huddle where if you wanted to you could have heard Jenaneane's titter. And they emerged, her small hot hand clutching his big hand.

They made a nice combination of movements; they made a very nice pattern those two, thoughtlessly moving to rhythm. He grabbed her hand and spun her around. She broke away and was almost dancing with someone else, the short guy with the Buddy Holly glasses who had managed to make Judy laugh, just another pattern on the side I thought. She was smiling and sweating and (this is how I remember it now) almost falling, gracefully, to the music, to the beat, which seemed to blow her limber body around the room. She was laughing into the loud music. She was laughing. She was so happy. And I thought if he were a dog, if he were just a dog, if only I could make him a dog in my mind...

I clutched my chair. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. The red head with the nervous greyhound. Dues ex machina. She waved and shrugged. The music was so loud. She smiled. She touched her chest. She touched mine. She pointed to the dance floor. She touched her chest. She touched mine. She smiled. She stopped smiling. She shrugged. She left.

I am not a graceful, nor a quick man, but I managed to negotiate a swarm of sweating bodies without getting damp, my chair in the one hand. I gathered my friend the belle époque want-to-be and wandered into the cool night, my chin tucked tight against my shirt collar, thinking Ah. No, just right. So. Ah!

One day she went away, she was gone for a whole half day. One morning I sat on the porch reading the laughers and weepers by myself. And when she came back she wanted to watch TV, she wanted to eat ice cream, and she wanted to sleep in bed. And she never said nothing. There was nothing to say. I never said nothing. I got her cookies and cream.

I imagined the way it could have been: she greeting me at the door with a nice tight smile, no shirt, a cold highball clutched to her smudged chest... those shoes! And a full furnished room, a fire without an end at her back. I imagined the way it could be. But from the half-lit streets, the wood legs of my new lover bumping down the broken road, I could hear the way it was: the wind high above the rooftops in the sycamores, crying like a dirty diapered newborn in the other room. And me fumbling for the lights.