The greatest number of accessory mammae was reported in 1866 by Neugebauer, who found ten in one woman.
Many images of Diana, the virgin goddess, portray her as polymastic, having over a dozen breasts. They look like clusters of tropical fruit; she doesn’t look too displeased but then she’s a goddess why the hell should she.
Tonight Gerard plays at the Ramada in the Nickelodeon Lounge, a space lit with dusky rose lights, the ceilings dangling coleus and mingy philodendra and spidery antique fans which are motionless and probably don’t work. With a small stack of student poems, I sit in one of the booths that line the far wall. The upholstery is a sort of crooked Aztec, the table waxy polyurethaned cherry. Gerard is at the piano up front in a coral-hued spotlight, swaying from side to side, fingers dribbling along the keyboard while he chats exuberantly at the audience, various members of which look up occasionally from their veal cutlets and fried mushrooms to nod, clap, or laugh with their mouths full. I give him a subtle wave and a broad wink, and he smiles, armlessly directing one of his jokes my way: “What did one lady cannibal say to the other lady cannibal? ‘I don’t know what to make of my husband these days. Could I borrow a recipe?’ ”
The audience likes it, likes the idiocy of all this, though one woman near me has glanced down at her stroganoff and complained, “Please, not while we’re eating.” Gerard begins singing the Cabaret medley, his high notes occasionally strained and misshapen. When he gets to the song “Married,” he stops singing for a moment, his hands continuing in some bland arpeggios, and he says, “My wife: She’s one in a million. I just have to make sure she doesn’t find out.” A large white-haired man to my left, part of a two-couple foursome, guffaws loudly, then gets swatted in the arm by the woman next to him. Gerard smiles at me and moves quickly on through to the end of the song, the musical-comedy bliss of marriage. Gerard has never had a wife. Sometimes I think he knows too many philanderer and lady cannibal jokes to ever have one. “What did one lady cannibal say to the other lady cannibal?” he’s now asking. “ ‘Boy, is my husband in hot water!’ ” He bangs out some loud chords, there are some amused groans. Another lady cannibal joke is about how to make a husband stew. With onions.
I’m not sure why he feels so brutalized, or why he’s directing so many of these my way. Perhaps this is my self-centeredness, my failure to really know Gerard.
He finishes up the Cabaret medley. I applaud vigorously, and he nods, says thank you, keeps playing. He is trying to appear tireless. He creeps a ways into a Louis Armstrong song—“I went down to St. James infirmary / Met my baby there / Saw her laid out on the table / So sweet, so cold, so bare”—and then quickly moves into a Fats Waller tune, “Keeping Out of Mischief Now,” a weird, dark wit to the juxtaposition. This song is pretty, and Gerard sings it with his eyes closed, his electrically haloed face raised toward the ceiling, a religious painting in bright colors on black velvet. I think for a brief, glowy moment that even though people are getting up and heading for the salad bar, loading up with pickled beets, pickled corn, pickled beans — kidney, string, wax — that they appreciate Gerard, that he really is talented, that in some endless way I too will always be in love with him.
The song is over, but his fingers still linger on the keyboard, a salad-bar tinkle.
At the break the spotlight goes off and he comes over and sits at my booth. “More freshman poems?” He riffles quickly through the pile, a polite curiosity.
“Yeah, I keep thinking of leaving them at the salad bar. Next to the croutons, like an alternative lettuce.”
Gerard smiles wearily, then buries his face in his hands, a pianist’s hands, leathered trees of knobs, dour veins, branches of fingers. I reach over and touch his forearm. He feels embarrassed working here. The salad bar gets to him.
“I can’t come out,” he says, not removing his hands. “Not for at least ten minutes.”
I feel superfluous, a giant, wet flesh match in a sweater I just bought on sale this afternoon. “Okay,” I say, and we sit there, silent, sad, his shoulders heaving twice, his face vanished into his palms until finally, a long finally, he wipes his hands down slowly off his face and though pink-eyed and sleepy, he looks all right again. He has used up most of his ten minutes, and the spotlight has come back on, and no one is in it, a signal that Gerard’s break is over.
I take Gerard’s hand. “ ‘But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?’ ”
“Shit,” says Gerard, glancing over his shoulder. He picks up my empty drink and chugs it back. The ice cubes knock against his teeth and upper lip. “ ‘Churl,’ ” he says, putting the glass back down with a clunk. “ ‘Drunk all and left no friendly drop to help me out?’ ”
When we are depressed, we quote Shakespeare, to put things in perspective. Between us we know about five lines, which limits our perspective.
“How come you’re always Juliet and I’m always Romeo?” I moan.
“That, my dear,” says Gerard, getting up, “is the question of the century. We shall take it up anon.”
“A nun?” I bat my eyelashes, place my hands in prayer position.
“You have a silly brain,” he says, and tweaks my nose, this new habit of his.
“I have a silly brain?” I act appalled. I cross my eyes, spread my lips crazily, pull my hair up on end. I want to be happy.
“Bonne nuit,” he waves and shakes his head. Some of the pink has left his eyes. He is smiling.
“Ennui.” I wave back.
“Mom?” Georgie has switched the light on in her room.
“Yeah?” I walk in and she is sitting on the edge of her bed with nothing on but her underpants. The edges of her hair are damp and sticking to her face like the chic hairstyles of 1930 or 1963. Her skin is white and warm as bread.
“Why did you take your pajamas off, honey?”
“Did Mrs. Kimball go home?”
“Yes, she did. Aren’t you feeling well?” In sickness and in sickness, till death do us part.
“I can’t sleep,” she says.
“I noticed. How come?” I locate her nightgown underneath her pillow and smooth her hair back with it, like a towel.
“I dunno.”
“You don’t know?”
“Uh-uh. Mary Merwin is going to have a baby brother or a baby sister.”
“Who’s Mary Merwin?”
“She’s a girl.”
I help her get back into her nightgown. “You know, it’s turning into winter out there.”
“Mr. Winter-binter.”
She’s not sleepy.
I stand up and do my Statue of Sleep-Liberty imitation. Yawning and holding a torch: “ ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ ”
George smiles and I lean over and give her a puffle, something my mother used to do with us: press mother’s mouth against child’s neck and blow out air. It’s warm and wet and tickles. George tenses, shoulders up by her ears in anticipation, her whole body in a scrinch — then she giggles and relaxes. “Do it again,” she says, and I do it twice more.
“See you tomorrow, schminker-schmunker,” I say, love dissolving language into funny sounds, non-words.
“See you tomorrow, schminkie-schmunkie,” she giggles.
I wrinkle my nose, make a face. She sticks out her tongue and makes a humming sound. I blow her a kiss from the doorway, and she does a Bronx cheer in parody, an arm puffle, and I turn off the light.
Herman—
Nice poem. I like especially the part about the “bouquet of irises gooey and rotted like the dead heads of birds” and the way “limp panting tongues” resonates at the end. Technical point: You cannot say “to lay down” unless you mean to copulate with feathers. You must learn lay from lie before you can graduate. (In addition to the swim test there will be a lay detector test.) Otherwise, fine.