LEN'S HALF AN OPEN LETTER SENT TO "THAT COMMUNITY OF MY FAMILY AND INTIMATE FRIENDS — LETTER APPROPRIATELY CONCEIVED ALSO AS AN INFORMATIONAL SATELLITE, A PROBE LAUNCHED INTO THE EMOTIONAL CONSTELLATION SURROUNDING AND INFORMING THIS CORRESPONDENT'S PERSONAL ORBIT — EXCLUDING THE PARTIES BONNIE FLUTTERMAN TAGUS AND MICHAEL
ARNOLD TAGUS — REGARDING THIS CORRESPONDENT AND THE ABOVE TWO EXCLUDED PARTIES"
21-2
Beloved fathers and teachers, Please know that the party Leonard Shlomith Tagus, Gent., Ph.D., author of Motion in Poetry: The Theme of Momentum in Weimar Republic Verse, a monograph from which royalties in excess of three figures are forecast to accrue in fiscal 1985, Northwestern University's lone blade-burnished Teutonist, student, teacher, son, father, brother; that wiliest of connubial mariners, that L. S. Tagus, having for nine years navigated successfully between the Scylla and Charybdis of Inclination and Opportunity, has, as of today, 21 February 1985, committed adultery, on four occasions, with one Carlìna Rentaria-Cruz, former significant other of my brother, Michael Arnold Tagus; that the party anticipates further episodes of such adultery; and that such past and highly probable future episodes will be brought to the attention of the party's wife, Ms. Bonnie Flutterman Tagus, between 1:00 and 2:00 pm (lunch) this date.
Know further that it is neither the desire & intention of L. Tagus, nor the project of an openly probing letter, either: (a) to excuse those libidinal/genital activities on the part of this party likely to excite disfavor or — ease within his intimate constellation; or: (b) to explain same, since the explanation of any transgression inevitably metastasizes into excuse (see (a)); but rather merely: (c) to inform those parties on whom my existence and the behavior that defines same can be expected to have an effect of the events outlined above and discussed, as usual, below; and: (d) to describe, probably via the time-tested heuristic pentad, the W's of why those events have taken and do and will take place; and: (e) to project the foreseeable consequences of such activities for this correspondent, for those other parties (B.F.T., M.A.T.) directly affected by his choices, and for those other other parties whose psychic fortunes are, to whatever extent, bound up with our own.
(a) and (b) conceded, then, and (c) killed in the telling:
Cinnamon girl. Full-lipped, candy-skinned, brandy-haired South-American-type girl. A type: a girl the color of dirty light, eyes a well-boiled white and hair like liquor, scintillant and smoky; precisely pointed breasts that shimmy when her chest caves in, when her chest caves in and hand flutters worried about the breastbone, from the laughter. Which is constant. This is a merry girl. Laughs at any stimuli not macabre or political, avoid abortion controversy; but otherwise a weather without change, a thing that carries her from place to place rather than obversely, a laugh of the piercing sort that resembles a possessed state, helpless, crumpled in around her perception of anomaly or embarrassment, harmless harm to anyone in a world that is only a violent cartoon, wet eyes darting around for assistance, some invitation to gravity, the detu-mescence of a nipple scraped in shimmy by cotton, some distraction to let her decontort. A merriment that is almost on the edge of pain.
And I watched her crumple, eyes the color of cream squeezed tight, over a tall and sonorous Graphix water-pipe, at the apartment of Mikey Tagus; and a wax-deaf man in a city of sirens heard one siren's fatal call; and the malignant, long-slalomed rocks mated with a crunch through the dry eggshell prow of my careful character. Carlina Rentaria-Cruz, secretarial aide at North Side offices of Chicago Park District. Twenty, lovely, light and dark, hair sticky with gin, our lady of wet rings on album covers, Spanish lilt, pointed boots, a dairy sheen to redly white skin, lips that gleam, shine a light — shine without aid of tongue — they manufacture their own moisture.
Contrast — please, neither offense nor explanation intended — contrast a wide-bottomed, solid, pale-as-all-indoors woman of thirty-four. Known in milliscopic detail. Large squash-shaped mole on left arm sports a banner of black hair. Nipples like pencil erasers, hard and corrective against wide shallow breasts whose broad curves I know like the Lake's own tired sweep. A woman ever armed with hemorrhoid pillow in one of only two stages of inflation, an obscene pink doughnut of hardened plastic, cushioning with her own dioxides the woman's legacy from the long and labored birth of Saul Tagus. A woman whose lips are chronically dry (bad sebum flow) and collect a white paste at the corners. Whose posture, I confess, has always been a little too good for my complete peace of mind. And whose quiet static laughter is always appropriate, conscious, complicated by an automatic and sophisticated concern for the special sensitivities of everyone present.
Viz. Bonnie laughs only with; Carlina was so conceived and constituted as to laugh only at.
E.g. Representative Laughter-Scenario: B. F. Tagus: Envision dinner party — B. F. Tagus filling her self-imposed quota of one family anecdote that will 'tickle' our guests: "And Joshua gets his piece of pie from the waiter, and his eyes are getting bigger and bigger' (uncanny imitation here) 'he looks at it, and he says to me, he whispers when the waiter's left he says Momma, why Momma there's ice cream on this pie, and I say but Joshua, the waiter asked you if you wanted your pie a la mode honey and you said yes; and Joshua looks at me he's about to cry almost the poor love and he says A la mode? Momma I thought he said pie all alone. Is… what… he… thought… he…" (hand to mouth, eyes frighteningly wide, unaffected, shoulders moving up and down in sync, laughter full of love, good will, etc.).
Vs. Representative Laughter-Scenario: C. R-Cruz: 'Len, Len, what is different between beer nuts and deer nuts. I hear this in a club on the Loop' (The Loooop.) 'Beer nuts are fifty cents and yet deer nuts are just under a… buck!' (Becoming here crumpled, other, helpless in the grip of the nasty (grip of the nasty).)
Not to mention an utterly deadly accent, a fellation of each syllable through the auto-lubricated portal that is at once a deep garden and a tall jagged city. A planet.
'OH LENITO I WILL EEET YOU!'
(Congress, by the way, has revealed itself here to be a loud and exquisitely goy affair — cries from Carlina and accessory of a desperation only partly channeled; mad twined scrabble of a search for something key hidden at a system of bodies' center.)
And so ungodly precise about it alclass="underline"
'Len, Len, how many of the girls known as Jewish American Princesses are needed for the screwing in of a light bulb?'
'Princesses?'
'Answer is two of them I heard. One to call a Daddy and one to buy the Tab!' contorting into wherever she sits. (Wicked. There is a wickedness in the corners here, and it is good, see below, (though I must say I found that particular joke offensive.))
Further,
MIKEY AND LOUIS
"So what's the point of even calling him, then?"