Mark Leyner - I Smell Esther Williams

She leaves and returns with a stack of magazines.

“What’s that?” he says rubbing his eye.

“Cynthia …”

“My eye itches like crazy … Cynthia what?”

“Cynthia Hayden asked for these when I was done.”

“Cynthia Hayden wants decorator magazines?”

“She asked for them when I was done so I said fine. Don’t rub it — it’s getting all red.”

“Do we have any Visine?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. Why don’t you rinse it a little with some cool water.”

“It’s alright.”

“Did you see the picture of Carter with the Indian headdress?”

“Where?”

She folds the paper and hands it to him.

“What’s that for?”

“It has something to do with that commercial where the Indian cries about pollution.”

“He reminds me of Anthony Quinn at the end of ‘Requiem For A Heavyweight.’ ”

“Is that … is that where Bogart does publicity for …”

“That’s not ‘Requiem …’ ”

“Let me finish.”

“I know what you’re talking about.”

“What?”

“That’s not ‘Requiem For A Heavyweight.’ That’s ‘The Harder They Fall.’ Bogart’s a sports writer and becomes a press agent for this mob’s fighter stable … no, for this mob-owned giant South American fighter who can’t fight. He’s a giant dumb fighter — the ‘Bull of the Pampas’ or something — and they let him get slaughtered and don’t pay him and he’s got poor parents and everything and finally at the end Bogart pays him out of his own pocket and writes a big exposé with his wife leaning over the typewriter.”

“Do you want a match?”

“No … wait … yeah, yeah — I thought I had one more in here.”

She reaches into a drawer across from the table.

“Here.”

He lights a True Menthol with a kitchen match.

“When you spoke to your father last, what did he say about your mother’s surgery?”

“What about it?”

“Does she need it or not or what?”

“Probably. She’s got an appointment this week or next week with a man in New York.”

“With Larry’s cousin?”

“Not Larry’s cousin — with a gastroenterologist.”

“At Mount Sinai?”

“Not at Mount Sinai — at his office.”

“She’s upset?”

“She’s probably upset. It’s not serious really.”

“What do you mean it’s not serious?”

“It’s not serious — she’ll probably need it done every once in a while from now on. It’s annoying and uncomfortable — but it’s not serious.”

“What’s serious to you?”

“A blood clot is serious, a broken hip is serious at her age, a heart attack is serious, a stroke …”

Paige had again found herself in the position of defending her stout republicanism. When the call to evacuate came over the wireless, we were like breathless kewpie dolls waiting to get knocked over. In retrospect, I think some of us were ready to tickle and goose each other, or slide down the banister like banshees, or almost kill each other … anything. Our wraith of a monarch had gotten us out of one jam too many. A child’s bib with scenes from a chiropractor’s office on it was draped over the trophy you’d received from the figure salon, and, in the sense of no two snowflakes being exactly alike, the spectrum of smirks seemed infinite and optimism’s things were taken from the guest room and heaped on a mattress of straw on the gatehouse’s cellar floor from which, ten years ago, we had watched the Jets defeat Baltimore. Suddenly, the investment of libidinal energy appeared transparently premature. And night fell like a skydiving student with an incompetent instructor.

So it was regretful when frog-voiced Dr. Bim revealed supper’s deceptive allure. “I don’t care what people say! I’m sick of pretending and scheming!” And burst into the florid leitmotif of the chain Burger Rex that fell on flushed burning ears.

When he shot her a glance that was like the pulsar at the heart of the Crab Nebula, her body slang translated into the “missing mass” needed to bind the universe and she squirmed in her seat like Laura says Clarence does. She seemed muddleheaded. You could picture untreated waste surging up her carotid arteries, coursing through the plexus of aqueducts in her brain. She possessed all the qualities of a carrier. And there hadn’t been a shadow of doubt among us that she’d eventually beguile some eligible westerner with her ability to transmit vast quantities of data quickly and efficiently. She was, in this way, so much like the public — not issue oriented; and, in another way, so much like Moses — the apotheosis of style. Perhaps prosperity lay upon the far flung frontiers of the empire. There were ten thousand tons of gold in the Serra das Andorinhas to be had. Bim tapped the aspic mold of the Krupp munition plant with his teaspoon and watched it shake.

That ice-cold metal lozenge beat in his body, his demeanor not unlike a palindrome — identical coming and going. Natural history had never seemed less like a change of pace. My snaps cracked in the washer’s mini-basket tub and the red fragrant spine sizzled up the flue — the suspected mass of frizzled hair between the teeth of plumbers everywhere caused a great deal of unacknowledgeable anticipation. It was impossible to decide whether to stay or go and the local crowd had arrayed itself on both sides of the controversy … they’d quarrel and then make-up, quarrel and then make-up, quarrel and then make-up, quarrel and then make-up, quarrel and then makeup, and their eyes would turn like little pairs of sequins from wristwatch to wristwatch as if the time of day were a poker hand that someone held. In the refrigerator’s hum one could discern those unsettling lines from Edna Keeston’s poem “Chafing Dish Dinner Is My Name-O”: “… and exercise devices / developed by former Olympic athletes / girdle the planet.”

I had exhausted my patience trying to reason with him. He’d claimed that I brought the snowy weather with me — that I’d come through Union Station, D.C.’s gargantuanistic ecclesiastical train station with contraband weather in my bags. She sat in front of a Titan heater and the rotating blade forced hot air against her cheeks. It felt hard in my pocket. Let’s make a mistake we’ll regret. Again I canvassed the neighborhood, with my masquerade and luggage — the sun gently tapered towards the corner of town. Again this sense of ethnicity, this sense of culpability, which, by day, surfaced like bubbles in beer, by nightfall was impossible to distinguish from the sidereal backdrop that exhausts bullets in its dense ultramarine. Footsteps were sloshy — sneakers filled with champagne. He’s got a staple gun, someone yelled. He’s stapling everyone’s hat to his head — trying to bring it all back to the 1930’s. J. Edgar Hoover — more effective when he and the gangsters he chased dressed alike. But it had all happened once too often. E-Street across from the FBI Building, a hamburger joint, boys with radios strapped like life support systems to their bodies. It started snowing. It started snowing again. From the window, this was not visible. A striped feather fell like a limp wrist from the wine bottle on its sill and the flying saucer was an astringent to the eyes.

God, it was beautiful and while some aliens disappear through the brackish surfaces of patio pools, change their names, and erect lawn ornaments towards which citizens in transit direct their heated comment, others cling to tradition, the women allowing the hair beneath their arms to grow until it tumbles to their elbows like hanging plants. A week before our birthdays, we turned restlessly in bed. Lay in our submarine. Swayed in the hammock in our submarine. Held our ankles and held our heads between our knees. I dreamt I was the plane’s pilot and bombed the city. How I’d hold you in my mind. The amaranth of your face wafted in the day’s crests and troughs. But it was no good. Smitty felt pressure from his mother’s side of the family to marry only a girl who believed that the sun revolved around the earth. He felt pressure expand at his skull’s seams and he had a bottle of Irish whiskey to drink. I stuck a finger into the St. Croix bric-a-brac. Good-bye saucer, alien, sub, pilot, hinged headache, whiskey, bric-a-brac, stuffed nose. Good-bye full bladder, cher ami.