Stuart Dybek - Paper Lantern - Love Stories

Not like she cares. She saunters to the corner, buys a snow cone from the old vendor who doesn’t scoop crushed ice, but shaves it off a block kept cold beneath a canvas as it was done in the country where he was a child. Yellowjackets swarm his bottles of tropical flavors. Madame Moth orders electric-blue syrup that tastes like no flavor in nature. Beneath the black visor, her lips at the melting edge of the paper cone turn frostbite-blue. Not pausing to drop her change into the sombrero of the blind accordion man pumping conjunto, she strolls back as if the only reason she’s come to the barrio is for a snow cone and, without raising the visor, vanishes through the doorway and up the stairs into the building’s ripe, unlit corridors.

It’s not long—time enough to finish the cone, maybe for a toke or two, or to snort a line or huff fumes or chew one of those spooky gummies Rafael deals—before the airshaft echoes a chant that has renounced words, but not meaning. The city is full of people who can’t understand one another’s language but get the meaning—like listening to opera when all you have to go on is the pure emotion of the voice. Her voice sounds naked, and though the kids outside mock it, they know they’re listening to a sin.

If in the stifling heat Rafael put on his respirator and painted only her streak of voice, he wouldn’t have to worry about finding the space on his walls to fit in a life-sized portrait of Sera Outlaw from the burbs, slumming on a pricey Harley, in her defiantly arrested Wild One getup. The portraits of the women from the hood who have staked out a place on the walls feel it’s already overcrowded. They don’t need Sera Outsider playing let’s pretend. Maybe there’s a patch of peeling plaster beneath the sink in the cramped john with its roaches and running toilet where Rafael could squeeze in a still life: the black helmet draped with a Victoria’s Secret cinnabar thong, weighting down the tank top, leather trou, knife, belt, stompers, piled on the buckled linoleum.

The women see themselves reflected on Madame Moth’s visor. They can’t see her face. They wonder how they look to her, if she’s able to see beyond her own reflection. The women’s eyes don’t blink, never close, don’t sleep—even Sleeping Beauty’s eyes are painted open. Night is when they’re most awake. They watch over the dreaming artist tossing on a sweat-stained mattress surrounded by melted candle stubs. Their lips are parted as if they’re about to moan, pray, or whisper a lullaby, but he’s left them mute, a limitation they were unaware of until now as they silently listen to the yearning voice amplified by the airshaft. To paint her voice, Rafael would need to feather the spray into the icy impression of her lips; he’d need a hue that matched the unnatural taste of the blue nectar that’s soaked into the tongue she licks along his body.

Sera Outlaw has her own ideas of what he’ll paint. She’s discussed the fantasies that haunt her at obsessive length with her shrink, Dr. Fallon, for whom talk is decidedly not cheap. “You need to work through them. Life is risk: experiment,” he’s counseled her. “When you’ll instinctively recognize the right one, it will shake you to the core.” If her fantasies could be perfectly realized outside the secret cell of her mind, then perhaps she could separate from them.

Pose me as a queen blindfolded at the wild border of a realm I once ruled, bind me to a signpost to be abused by passing wanderers who care only for their own pleasure; paint me as the desecrated, living statue of a goddess, a deity from a shattered urn in a temple defiled by barbarians—brutish-looking men have always turned me on. Paint me as Saint Teresa in Ecstasy, or as Joan of Arc, stripped of armor and, threatened with punishment, flaring colors as if the mattress she’s staked to is a stained-glass window in the cathedral at Rouen.

“Where?”

“France.”

“There’s not enough wall space. I’ll have to make up a big canvas.”

“No, I want it to be a mural locked away in this room. I’ll need a key to visit it. You can whitewash the walls, paint over the others. You did them free, right? I’ll pay.”

The voiceless women on the walls have begun to scream.

“It’ll be your first commission. Paint the walls the white of a bride’s veil. Obliterate the skanks, then call me. It’ll be a new start for both of us. I’ll be your masterpiece.”

* * *

She returns during Fiesta del Sol, a time in August when Pilsen is baubled in lights. Blue Island Avenue closes from Eighteenth to Twenty-first Streets—three congested blocks of carnival rides whirling to mechanical mariachi music. A Ferris wheel, tall enough to reflect its luster along a shadowy church spire, rotates hypnotically. A ring has been erected in which masked luchadores wrestle in the way that life and death are locked in daily combat. There are galleries for games of chance, booths where fortunes are told, concession stands, and food stalls. A spicy haze from grilling chorizos smolders in the beam of an enormous searchlight battered by moths. For five tickets you can pan the beam along the undercarriage of clouds or off the skyline of downtown. When firecrackers start popping like a drive-by, no one dives for cover.

Blocks away, inside St. Ann’s, a vigil candle strobes as it sputters in melted wax and the bullet-pocked stained-glass windows flicker.

Stumbling back to his flat, buzzed on a cocktail of liana and mescal, Rafael notices the red Harley parked on the sidewalk. He looks up and down the empty street. Everyone not asleep, including the snow-cone vendor and the accordion man, must be at the fiesta. Rafael climbs the dark stairs yodeling out gritos in a soulful yi-yi-yi! Ordinarily, he’s quiet, tight-lipped. Perhaps he has confused his flirting with a fortune-teller for feeling intimations of the future. When the fortune-teller asked to read his palm, Rafael told her he was sorry, but he didn’t have the five tickets that seeing the future cost. She caught his wrist and pulled him close. “For you, a free sample,” she said. Smiling at his handsome face, she turned his palm over and traced its lines, before jerking her finger back as if she’d been shocked. Or as if she had seen too many cheesy movies where a phony gypsy fakes the same theatrical response—which is what Rafael told her.

“If you don’t believe in telling the future, do you believe in telling the past? The past is just as secret and mysterious,” she said. “But I can read what’s hidden in your eyes.”

“I’m listening,” he said.

“You are hiding twelve tickets. If your first fortune didn’t please you, you’d of had enough tickets left to buy a completely new one. Only a fool thinks he can deceive a Roma.”

Rafael laughed, reached in his pocket, and dropped a handful of tickets on the counter before her.

“Too late,” she told him. “Once you miss your chance you can give all you got, but won’t catch fate’s attention again.”

“I guess it’s good night, then,” he said.

“Don’t go without this,” she said, and handed him the key to his flat. “You just tried to give it away along with your tickets. You’re drunk, angel.”

“So are you,” he said, and leaned into the booth to kiss her.

“I told you, it’s too late,” she said. “Even a kiss that will be my first thought in the morning won’t matter.”

In the dark hallway, at the door of his flat, Rafael searches his jeans for the key. He knows the fortune-teller returned it. He can summon the cinnamon taste of her mouth. She must have been eating churros. The key is in his shirt pocket where he never puts it.

“Somebody had a fun fiesta,” Sera Outlaw says. “How come you didn’t invite me? We could’ve held hands on the Ferris wheel. I’ve been waiting for you to call, I can’t say patiently. Any idea what that feels like—waiting when you really want something, when you can’t stop thinking about it, and the more you obsess, the more you need it?”