Mark Leyner - I Smell Esther Williams

I suspected that someday this message for you would be transmitted through the neutrino mail, and ease through the earth’s core, emerging someday in your smallville, and slipping through the gold slot at the bottom of your door: Where did we go wrong? What roadsign, in the moonless night, through the murkiness of our tinted glass, did we misinterpret? Why didn’t you say what you meant about your needs at a time when our levels of wholeness were originating in our being meaningfully instead of possessively involved in the feelings we mutually held but mutually refused to acknowledge on any terms other than our own respectively, as if by different treasure maps we could arrive at the same X-marks-the-spot in terms of us? Should we have sought professional counseling?

The cab driver retrieved a discolored rag from beneath his seat and stanched the steady trickle of blood from a wound above one eye that had been inflicted by the jagged tip of a teakwood-handled parasol belonging to his previous fare. The embassy flagpoles were empty. Certain types, I thought to myself, are utterly practical, in the tradition, for instance, of the pioneering test pilots who logged their flight data in pencil because ink would freeze at higher altitudes. As we neared the General Accounting Office, I glanced at my watch and yielded to a sudden impulse, directing the driver to undertake a slight detour. Call it hackneyed, call it sentimental, but I had to see the Tidal Basin just once more. And idling near its shore, I spied them: two entwined smartly-dressed saplings cooing like Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald beneath a naturally formed gazebo of Japanese cherry blossoms. “There,” he said, waving up at the glorious canopy of inviolable American air space, “is where our thoughts are kept after we die.” “The Washington Monument,” she mumbled, “is a mammoth white french fry stretching towards the mouth of a celestial teenage presence,” and he turned and turned and turned and the lights from the high rises along the Potomac trembled in the water.

The train was filled with spirits of the dead stained with the dross that hung in the air, not from New Jersey, but from its filthy neighboring states like Pennsylvania. The train was filled with a spirit of dandruff and with basketball players … with their portable lives. And passengers were employing telekinesis to get lunch rather than wait on line and the air was filled with slow moving sandwiches, but now and then an alarming biological clock-radio would spark a mini-disturbance. Then in Trenton, a girl named Polly sat next to me wearing white patent leather shoes with little straps and she peered at me as if I were the creditor-dodging dabbler in laudanum and abnormality from whom she had undoubtedly fled, but, in the unblemished light of thorough scrutiny, the resemblance apparently vanished, and when she got a big package of tootsie rolls out of a shiny little white purse, I dove for my cigarettes, almost surrendering to impulse once more, almost blurting out “this is the planet of escapes, let’s you and I swallow the key and stay awhile,” almost quoting the astronomer from It Came From Outer Space , “… this may be the biggest thing that ever happened,” but I became nauseated by the confluent odors of tootsie roll and Prince Matchabelli, and in my pants my penis drooped like the long ash of a burning cigarette. And then we stopped in front of a large Johnson & Johnson plant to let cattle cross over the tracks. So beautiful. Through the plant’s grounds ran a network of pseudo-Venetian canals filled with the most luxuriant lotions and powders for the delectation of both rail and automobile traffic. And shortly after we resumed our progress, I resumed my observation of the passing Jersey flora.

I arrived at my parents’ winter home in time to see the LaConti Construction crew unload from its truck the nine-foot marble head from Daniel Chester French’s statue “Neapolitan Fisherboy Listening To A Short-Wave Radio.” In his desperation to find me a suitable birthday gift, Father had hired LaConti to decapitate the statue which was on loan to the Newark Museum from the National Gallery. I had always been very keen on French’s work. My sister, on the other hand, had always been a gravity buff. “Father,” I said, “what have you done? You’ve defaced a national treasure.” Mother wrung her hands, “You test us and test us — holding your breath till you’re blue — getting outa the car, into the car, outa the car — you drive us to it!” Father snapped a bulbous rubber nose into place, “Gotta split — G-men after us — take care of the firm, boy of mine.” “What did you get Ruth?” I yelled after him. “Go see, she’s in her room,” he said, wrapping his arms around Mother’s waist, their moped zipping down the driveway. I dashed upstairs. There, suspended magnetically above her beanbag chair, was a specially annealed niobium cylinder. My sister was on the couch in the fond clutches of her fiancé who had a nearly two-dimensional head — it was the flattest head I’d ever seen — her sweater was bunched up around her neck and her unsnapped brassiere rested above her bare breasts like eyeglasses on someone’s forehead. What a meshugena gift.… We all felt smaller and smaller in the coming days, which seemed shorter and shorter. And everything seemed diminished and fly-by-night.

Well, what is so new about Jersey? Or Mexico. Or England. What could be new in this multiplication of the present … in these bowdlerized translations from the rural? The good life, so called, is over, and that laugh we’d flexed hangs a bit flaccidly between our ears … we seem serious about wanting to outlive each other … and that may be the one source of all travel.

We are unhappy fleas, aren’t we.

Well, if ever there was a rebuttal to marital felicity — they were it. He inevitably left the oven on and compared her Belgian waffles to old sanitary napkins and never saw to it that there were enough bulbs in the house, and she, as you could imagine, was not the easiest person in the world to get along with, but … listen to me.… I’ve been chattering away like a galley slave, and look at the hour. The sun is up, and it’s time to let the greyhounds chase me round the track. Again.

Hoping that one last slug of warm Shlitz would give him the courage to finally say to Patty, “I love your breasts, the way one breast presses against the U of your sweatshirt, the way the other presses against the A, making the S a spot where a man could lay his head in peace,” Oscar tipped his airline cup to his lips. But the words wouldn’t come and god Oscar wanted to slip his hand under that shirt and feel her warm bare back and kiss her freckled nose. “This is where I get off,” he said, crestfallen, squeezing past Patty’s knees and ambling up the aisle to the door of the plane. “Bye,” he waved sheepishly; and he jumped. As he fell through the air, he looked up towards Patty’s window and Patty was frantically waving his parachute in her hand, yelling “Oskie, you forgot this!” Oscar’s descent, being the shortest path between two points, was swift. He hit the ground with an awful thud. I was the first to reach him. “Oscar, buddy, ol’ pal of mine, say a few syllables,” I said. His eyes seemed a bit glazed. “Someone just hit me in the head with a pillow,” he said. “Oscar, Oscar,” I keened, “You’re seven-eighths dead, you’re all busted up like a ceramic Buddha dropped from the World Trade Center — do you have any last words?” I wet his lips with my italian ices. “All I ever wanted to do,” he whispered, “was finish my novel … and drag a good Catholic girl through the mud a few times.” “Ciao, old friend,” I said. Randy, Normandi, Ray, Rachel, Wayne, and me — we’ll never forget you.