Michael Martone - Four for a Quarter - Fictions

BLUE JAY

Each married to someone else, they were conscientious enough to call their spouses when they were away together with each other, taking turns to dial home or receive a call while the other busied him- or herself in the bathroom of the hotel room, reading the local attractions magazine. But the room, big as it was, was not big enough to damp the half-heard half conversation going on nearby, making both the participant and the eavesdropper self-conscious, so that the latter got dressed and left the room to take a walk around the property, to loiter in the lobby, or even to have a drink in the bar, half-watching the sports spill from the television floating overhead, finally to call back to the room from a house phone in the elevator lobby and hear the operator report, more often than not, that the line was in use, asking if you wished to leave a message. Leaving the room meant the one leaving had to get dressed since most time in the room was spent undressed — fucking or relaxing after fucking, recovering from fucking, eating and drinking naked in the room. Room service is ordered after fucking and received by one of them, wrapped only in a robe or draped with a long nightshirt that will be stripped off before getting back into bed to feed each other and to talk about what each of them does when they are not together fucking, their lives apart from each other with their own other, who — soon after they have finished their salmon and salad, the warm white wine, after they have both come again — they will call and tell, the person on the other end of the line, what he or she had for dinner and how from the tower of this hotel you can see an endless parade of airliners drifting across the window on approach to the nearby airport, so slow as to seem they would almost stall, fall out of the sky altogether, one after the other, in the dusk, their lights strobing and the exhaust of their engines muffled, to be sure, but still registering a noticeable sound, a muted bellow that rattles, at the right pitch and harmony, the safety glass in the aluminum frames of the hotel's windows. After many nights like this, over many different occasions, in many different airport hotels, no one gets dressed or strays very far from the bed when the other one phones home; instead the one not talking on the telephone fits him or herself into the negative template of the body next to him or her, watches the muted television using the remote to scan the channels in silence as the conversation continues, and the jets outside slide down the glide path, yawing, pitching, rolling, making that yawning roar, turning, as the time passes, into diffuse shade then into simple pixels of a constellation, of pulsing lights that outline the now absent bulk of the darkened backlit shadow of the falling fuselage. A hand rests on a stomach, a leg is thrown over the other's leg as the call continues, half-heard queries concerning that day's mail, the children's school, an appointment rescheduled, the changing weather. The halfhearted embrace proceeds in the midst of the phone call — the mumble at the ear; the other hand, scanning with the remote the blinking television, has evolved from the past's position of polite neutrality, the mutual drifting separation, to this, this cozy almost domestic new intimacy with the lover who hasn't, until now, shared this part of his or her life and the lover who hasn't, until now, wanted any hint of that life overheard, now settling in with this new order of cobbled-together proximity, shrinking distances over distance. The free hand finds a trail of drying come along the belly or on the inside of the thigh, and a finger begins to pick at the crust of it, flaking it with a nail, and as the lover's conversation with home burbles above, the archeology of the skin begun in starts and stops — almost as if this patch here was sterile field divorced from the rest of the resting body — starts to turn more serious, the touching now turning into a shallow massage disguised as absentminded petting, as the voice on the phone that has been so even and controlled spikes a slight fever, a heightened pitch. They glare when they look at each other, hinting at the hint of anger, both about the interruption of the phone call and the phone call's interruption, that gives way to the furthering of the sexual steps they have been perfecting in the hotel room, the one on the line now barely putting together a string of noncommittal head-nodding affirmations to whatever question has just come through, the conflicted look torn in two between the here and there and the now and now, attempting to sort out the unimportant stimuli from the immediate noise and, at the same time, focus the full attention on the faraway, the evening of the evening on the other end of the wire. His cradled half-hard cock rolls in her hand. She holds his hand, his fingers inside her, hard against her to keep them from moving. He shields his nipple, directs her kisses to the rib below. She blocks her ear opposite the handset from his breath. All completed in stifled silence. This end of the conversation kept up. Fucking again, now, through the phone calls, silent, suppressed, turned inward, listening hard to the rasping in the ear, the receiver pressed hard against the head as if each of them, when it is their turn, hangs on to some handle of sanity, anchoring their consciousness while the body below is being dismembered piece by piece. It is a kind of sex toy, the telephone, vibrant but inert, innocuous, a chunk of putty-colored plastic molded to the ear, enzymatic magic, the fulcrum around which they turn, and turning, they both now want to say something, to speak, talk, change the subject, bend it over something, move the conversation from the ear to the mouth, feeling the coming words come, emit the innocent protestations of longing, of feeling the distance and the night closing in, of missing you so much, of letting loose the shared formula of words developed over all these years of partnered arrangement to propel the change of the subject, to signal the desire for desire, speaking the cracked-open code to the loved one on the other end of the wire—“Let's come. Right now. I am almost there already. I'll wait. It's late“—all the excuses of coaxing as the coaxing continues, the lubrication of the imagination, and when she comes, when he comes, the others over there, they come with a long report carried through the lines by means of jostled charged electrons, and the lovers, embedded, ears glued to the phone, listen together, in love now with listening, connected and connected. And after the after, together, in the hotel bathroom, they brush their teeth together, heads down, avoiding the mirror, rinsing and spitting at the same time, getting ready for bed, for sleep. The hotel provides a box that plays a provided CD of ambient sounds taken from nature — the seashore with a running tide, a rapid waterfall scouring a rock ledge, wind in a stand of pine — all designed to cancel out the cascading turbulence of the landing jets, the climbing jets that, as they turn to their outbound headings, tear open the sky, ripping ripped cloth. This shouldn't work, they both think on the edge of sleep, in the dark, their heads filled with a catalog of auditory interference, this should not work, this empty glen, the oak forest in the background, the swish of wiregrass, the drill of a bird's call. This should not work, the rough edge of a blue jay's squawk filing down the aggregate of air oscillating at random and without end, all around them.

1. Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He is a largely airborne vapor prone to gather over deforested landmasses and to accrue at times in ice pack at high altitudes. It is believed that he originated as a weather assault planned by inland aboriginal peoples upon their coastal colonial oppressors, though records are vague as to how his instigators lost control of him. If Martone currently has a political bent to the wetnesses he perpetrates, such inclinations are unknown. For a time, he was the proven accomplice of a herd of bison that assembled from the aggregate oatmeals of various air caves. He roamed with these creatures, providing a necessary buoyancy for their frequent rituals of cloud mimesis. Martone also served as general counsel for a society of basil plants that sought to expand its collective bargaining potential during the Herb Riots of the previous century. He converted himself into a kind of olfactory grid, transmitting coded scents at supersonic speeds and thus greatly accelerating the conclusion of that conflict. In perhaps his most legendary pursuit, Martone became intimately involved in translating the languages of several quartzes, salts, and bituminous coal veins on the high plateaus of a few interconnected deserts. During his sessions with these substances, he would acquire a luminescence frequently misconstrued as the hallmark of a divinity. It was only when he snowed upon the chiefs of these tribes — a sign of mutual vulnerability nearly forgotten among the consolidation of ceremonies from one generation to the next — that they accepted him as a benevolent force, a fog of kindness. Once the confusion was resolved, Mar-tone quickly developed the crystalline mnemonics necessary for cataloging various tenses and cases within an octadecimal index easily replicated by most research institutions on islands and peninsulas alike. In more recent eras, Martone has preferred to disseminate himself among the vernacular rains of infatuated corks and other highly permeable substances. He says he enjoys the sensation of thinness he feels at such moments. He says he enjoys being all around us.