Mark Leyner - I Smell Esther Williams

Ray thought it was funny that my toilet is coin-operated — but what does he think this apartment complex is, a public school? Up in the rarefied air of my income bracket, you get what you pay for, Ray!

The last thing she said was, “I’m about to be discovered. I’ve been pitting all my friends against each other.”

So I said, “That’s an intensely delicate operation to have undertaken. And I really admire intense individuals. In fact, people have said that I have a certain intensity. A certain ‘I don’t know what exactly.’ A certain hunger for truth … a certain thirst for adrenaline maybe. Perhaps an unnatural affection for danger, a latent death wish … a kind of hopelessly self-destructive Weltschmerz. Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“I’m about to be discovered. I’ve been pitting all my friends against each other.”

The October weather has been delightful. Like that crisp breeze just now. Did you see how rosy it made my cheeks? The playoff games have been more than body and soul can bear. Vitamin E has transformed my scalp into a fertile promised land. But the dead Pope looks like an ornate canary laid out that way.

Some afternoons, the sun hits my phonebook at just the right angle and light shimmers off its cover like shards of topaz. Other men may be stalled in traffic, asleep with their succubi. Other men may be sitting down to dinner already. These men eat too early! But we men are such a club. With our habits and clothes. We love to kiss babies when we campaign. And we love to drink coffee. And that accounts for the sheer voluminosity of our philosophies, all that coffee.

Ah, October whatever it is. I’m back in the saddle again. I’m the story of lovely lady who was very very very bewitching. As George Eliot said of Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch , “Most men thought her bewitching when she was on horseback.” I feel as if a sixteen ounce glove has softened the fist of fate’s devastating uppercut. I feel as if horse tranquilizer has slowed the team that aproaches with my hearse. As if firemen have discovered new ladders, to discover me. The addlepated officer, retrieved, fighting a war that ended thirty-three years ago. The last of the Mohicans. The final Brontosaurus-burger sold on a Sat. night. Half swan, half doe. With feathers of Chantilly lace and hooves of translucent quartz.

On the other hand, I’m an insular queen amidst all this exalted glee, amidst these Visa cards and platters of cheese and smoked lox. Even when I’m playing bridge, I have to worry about my ex-husband’s friends bombing my oil fields. In the dead of night, having to throw on a few things and go join the bucket line. It may be just a false alarm that a kid’s idle hands turned in or a ruse contrived by my sister to get me to my surprise party! I don’t know what to say. “For me?” or “You shouldn’t have!” or simply “I don’t know what to say.” But the simultaneous sensation of rampant happiness and anxiety results in a kind of torsion that is exhilarating.

Aaaaaaahhh! To sleep, though, I need to be tapped not so gently on the forehead with a rubber mallet. Zzzzzzzzzzzzz …

It feels magnificent, in this Morristown orchard, heaving apples towards the doe, with you, to end something here with this kissing and this tacitly fiducial understanding that this finality has all the taut resilience of a trampoline lofting us back next time across the flat lasagna pans that our separate individual lives have devolved towards … this monody of kissing — this flicker of emulsion.

The germs in her nostril clung from tiny hairs which bristled like stalactites, and she said “Ahhhhhhchoooooo!” And from her delicious mouth sallied forth bits of a cyclist moving from left to right, bits of blue body-warm linen, bits of a tattle, bits of sky — of its blue polyhedra, bits of a spritz.

— Gesundheit.

— Thanks.

“May I have this dance, senorita?”

“You are indeed a wonderful man, Captain Parker!”

— Thanks.

Everyone throw your beach balls at Liz Fox. Tonight? Liz Fox. Someone said “Liz Fox has the copies.” Liz Fox arrived and left. O.K., enough Liz Fox anecdotes! Liz Fox said “The thicket is covered with petrol.” Liz Fox had become a trembling oil spill. Did you hear? Liz Fox wanted my recipe. Someone’s creating the “Liz Fox” look. My family was huddled around the radio when Liz Fox said, “Today will live in infamy.” Liz Fox had a magazine and walked a crooked mile. Liz Fox is a notorious terrorist with international extortion never far from her thoughts. This is the first edition of Liz Fox. Liz Fox moved her tomato plants away from the window to keep them from freezing. “They’re cleaning Liz Fox up” was in the news. Can’t you find Liz Fox’s name in the white pages, foreign student? Standing at the far end of his yellow station-wagon, Liz Fox felt sad again. Liz Fox lost her baby and couldn’t let go but it was just her soap opera that was on. That guy fitted Liz Fox for gauntleted gloves. Liz Fox demanded that they reopen the investigation of the Attica massacre. Some guys smoked about a gram of really fine Liz Fox while they listened to records. Everyone followed Liz Fox to the out-of-the-way restaurant. Dance Liz Fox. Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Rip your wig off! Liz Fox said “Tomorrow will be better than today was!”

Who’s your father? See that over there, he said, pointing to a fifteen year old smoking a cigarette. Him. That’s my mother, he said, pointing to a pudgy guy in a fedora. You want your shot or not, he asked. Definitely, I said, I’ve been planning this trip to Europe for over three years. Well, he said, take your pants off and lie on those newspapers. As soon as the needle’s in you’ll be in Europe. He sang. Left a good job in the city. Workin for the man every night and day. Smallpox killed near everyone round here, reckon. I could hardly sputter a few words of thanks when the hay wagon jerked forward and we were off again. What are those, I asked, pointing to a cluster of make-shift tents near the high school. The teenagers who’ve left home live there. They still go to high school? I asked. Oh yes they like school very much because all their friends are there. I jumped out and ran to the front of the school. There was a tall beautiful oriental girl. She reached under her shirt, unfastened her bra, and put it around her waist like a belt. I followed her, along with another couple who’d been standing nearby, into one of the tents. I sat in the corner with the oriental girl and she cleaned some grass. The other couple was on the ground, kissing and clutching at each other. Then this happy-go-lucky guy came in and sat down with me and the oriental girl. The girl who was kissing the boy worked his pants off and tugged at his boxer shorts moaning. The boy grabbed at the tent’s flap trying to close it all the way. She wriggled out of her pants she wore no underwear. Suddenly the happy-go-lucky guy dropped his pants jumped up and entered her from behind. I’ll never forget her expression of surprise and pleasure as she arched her back and said ah ah ah!

“My son’s name was Diablito Leyner. Diablito—‘little devil.’ At three years of age he was five-seven, had body hair, a deep voice, read books, danced when you took him to Isadora’s, used stick deodorant, had sex with people’s housemates, had a receding hairline, drank too much now and then, and worried about things constantly. In fact, he was almost identically like myself. He was conceived on a spring night in a first floor alcove of the geology building where I’d found a janitress stooped in front of a display case of quartz specimens, completely transfixed with an annular sample of lapis lazuli. I tip-toed in back of her, lifted her skirt up, and we mated. So, one day I was defrosting my freezer. I’d put two or three bags of frozen vegetables in the back of the toilet tank to keep them cool. Diablito approached me from behind with a copy of Paradise Lost and read a passage: ‘O foul descent! that I who erst contended / With Gods to sit the highest, am now constrain’d / Into a Beast, and mixt with bestial slime …’ I stopped hacking away at the ice and told him it was time he hit the road and find out where he was at. ‘Take a bag of peas,’ I said, ‘and remember — eat where the truckdrivers stop, the food’s bound to be good.’ That was the last I ever saw of him. He’s changed his name to Richard Finestein. And he’s failed in half a dozen business ventures. The stock market, real estate, retail clothing, insurance, you name it. People say ‘Richard Finestein — he’s got a magic wand up his ass — everything he touches turns to shit.’ Well, I’m not the kind of guy who blubbers over spilled milk, if you know what I mean — but for weeks I’d just sit in that dilapidated Boston rocker and sweat buckshot and dumdum bullets and every night at the same time, a bus passed under my window followed, three minutes later, by a harried little man running with an overnight bag. Every night. You could time an egg by it. He’d run a few blocks and then stop, take a deep breath, turn around and walk back. One night I couldn’t contain myself — I flew downstairs just in time to collar the guy as he rushed by. ‘You again!’ he raged, ‘Every night you make me miss my bus!’ And he broke my grasp and ran, as was wonted, a few blocks, stopped, took a deep breath, turned around and walked back. As he approached me, he tipped his hat and bowed, ‘Excuse my behavior before,’ he said, ‘but I was in a terrible rush,’ and walked away … and I’m left standing there and I’m thinking — I’m like the guy who’s rummaged through a ton of glazed popcorn for something to hock and comes up with nothing but a sticky hand — and I’m thinking — what the fuck am I doing — I’m an asshole … and I was drinking so much V-8 juice that I always had diarrhea and I couldn’t find a razor I liked — the twin blades would get jammed up with hair and the little disposable single blades would cut me to ribbons …”