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 held 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?