Mark Leyner - I Smell Esther Williams

Connie and Lester are down by the well. Thick rolls of toadstools spring from its walls like the powdered curls of a colonial wig. Its floor is littered with shards and arrowheads.

I still have the taste of chicken livers in my mouth, Lester says.

Kiss me with your teeth, Lester.

He steps back a few yards so as to get a running start.

Spinning stripes … make a circle, Lester says, waving his towel like a lasso. He leaps at Connie, bowls her over, and bites her calf.

Twice for luck, I say, and he clutches the other one like a drumstick and bites it.

My ass is still stiff from Mass yesterday.

Lester pokes his thumb through the cellophane bag of pistachio nuts, I love you more than anyone, he says.

In the density of limbs and foliage, veils of shadow and oblong panes of sunlight partition the thicket into a thousand pieces.

I think I’m coming down with something, Lester coughs.

He points to a stump of flowering moss. To a dragonfly.

The wind rustles the trees. Catch a falling leaf, Connie says, making herself dizzy.

Lester’s got a first rate brain, Connie says, he can do two-thirds of nine without blinking and he’s a great phone conversationalist, she says, peering into the empty thermos, and stepping on a yellow jacket.

Show them your tin cans and wire, Lester.

Don’t be a stranger, Connie says tearfully, her arm lost to the elbow in a crystal bowl of raisinettes.

Come out and see my car.

She puts her bathrobe on and steps across the yard.

There.

It looks like an egg.

See.

It smells new.

Listen to the engine, I say, turning the key.

It sounds like a poète-maudit destined to die in shame.

Don’t, I say, handing her a tissue.

I think Lester really likes you, she says.

The ground shakes.

Tanks.

I’ll tell him that …

No, look. You can see their turrets through the trees.

It’s getting …

Don’t, I say.

That night, the rebels begin shelling our village. Headlights fill the highway and rain splatters the windshields. Connie watches the windshield wipers and Lester listens to them hum until he slumps against a carton of canned goods and snores. Connie is ludicrously gorgeous in her pale wheat-colored maillot — her hair is chestnut brown, her eyes are fathomless. Lester too is ludicrously gorgeous in his pale wheat-colored maillot — his hair is chestnut brown, his eyes are closed. Connie counts one white line after another after another after another after another after another after another. There’ll be plenty of time for tennis when we reach the island, Roz says, we should sign up for a court on Wednesday for Thursday and on Thursday for Friday and on Friday for Saturday and on Saturday for Sunday and on Sunday for Monday and on Monday for Tuesday.…

And on Tuesday for Wednesday? Lester asks, momentarily awake.

Go to the head of the class, Connie says. She unpeels her third banana, let’s play a game — I’m thinking of a person … someone we all know.

Is it me? Lester asks.

Is it? I turn to Connie and break off a piece of her banana.

The road conditions and traffic have brought us to a virtual standstill.

A man unloading baskets, bags and livestock from the top of a bus gives us directions to a modest hotel.

Next day, at the tourist information kiosk in the bus station, we are told to follow a boy who will take us to the rental agent.

He has a creaky old red schwinn he rides every morning along the man-made inlets where people dock their catamarans and sunfish, where ducks in groups of three and four glide by, and he throws them pieces of Carr’s Table Water Crackers which are the most popular crackers on the island, and these rides every morning before most people have arisen make him tan and less burdened with a feeling of responsibility for the heart attack his father had when he withdrew from law school and moved in with two waiters/actors.

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.

— 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.

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.