Stuart Dybek - I Sailed with Magellan

Joe remembers all that, but none of it — the booze, the coke, the Demerol, the waking up repeatedly in the dark already fucking — explains how it can be afternoon, or what her morning-glory dress is doing left behind. He yanks the dress off the mirror and is surprised to find a crack zigzagging down the center. Maybe it was the mirror they’d staggered into. He staggers into the kitchen and washes down a couple of painkillers with what’s left in a bottle of flat tonic water, then palms Old Spice onto his face and under his arms, tugs on his clothes, and dials Sovereign’s number. He knows it’s not a good idea to be calling from his place, but that can’t be helped. When Vi answers on the third ring, he asks, “Johnny there?”

“He’ll be home around four,” she says. “Can I tell him who’s calling?”

Joe hangs up.

From the closet, he digs out a gym bag stuffed with dirty gym gear and canvas gloves for hitting the heavy bag. He lifts the mirror from the bedroom wall, bundles it up in the dress, totes it into the alley, and sets it beside the garbage cans, then throws the gym bag into the Bluebird. Joe drives down the alleys, formulating a plan for how to get the shotgun into Sovereign’s car. Off Twenty-fifth, he scatters a cloud of pigeons and nearly sideswipes a blind old bag lady in a babushka and dark glasses who’s feeding them. When he pulls up behind Sovereign’s, Joe can smell the baking motor oil spotting the floorboards of the empty garage. Demerol tends to heighten his sense of smell. Wind rustling down the alley leaves an aftertaste of rotten food and the mildewed junk people throw away. He makes sure the alley is empty, then slips the sawed-off shotgun from under the seat and buries it in the gym bag, beneath his workout gear. The scotch bottle rests on top, and when he zips up the bag, the ghost of old gym sweat transforms into a familiar fragrance.

Marisol stands in the alley as if she’s emerged from the morning glories. She has a white flower in her auburn hair. Her perfume obliterates the scent of pigeons, garbage, and motor oil he’s come to associate with Johnny Sovereign. She’s dressed in white cotton X-rayed by sunlight: a shirt opened a button beyond modest, tied in a knot above her exposed navel, and white toreador pants. The laces of the wedged shoes he used to call her goddess sandals snake around her ankles. Her oversize shades seem necessary to shield her from her own brightness.

“See you’re still driving the B-bird,” she says, sauntering to the car. “That’s cute how you name your cars. Kind of boyish of you, Joe, though when you first told me your car had a name, know what? I thought, Oh no, don’t let this be one of those pathetic wankers who names his penis, too. Hey, I like the color coordination with the sport coat. That splash pattern is perfect for eating spaghetti with tomato sauce. Recognize this shirt? It’s yours. Want it back?”

She still speaks in the fake accent that when they first met had Joe believing she was from London. He’s not sure he’s ever heard her real voice, if she has one. He’d heard she broke her Audrey Hepburn neck in Europe when she blew off the back of some Romeo’s BSA on the Autobahn. Who starts these rumors about dead babes? Maybe Sal told him; Sal’s a know-it-all with a rep for spreading bullshit. Well, fucking allora, Sallie, if a very much alive Marisol, trailing perfume, doesn’t get into the Bluebird, help herself to a smoke from the pack on the dash, and ask, “Know where a girl can get a drink around here?”

Joe unzips the gym bag, hands her the bottle of scotch, and she asks as if she already knows, “What else you got in that bag, Joe?”

“Whataya mean, what else? Gym stuff.”

“Whew! Smells like your athletic supporter’s got balls of scomorza, ” Marisol says. “But what do I know about the secret lives of jockstraps.”

Joe looks at her and laughs. She always could break him up, and not many beautiful women dare to be clowns. Capri was funny like that, too, and no matter who he’s with he misses her. Where’s Capri now, with who, and are they laughing? Marisol laughs, then quenches her laughter with a belt of scotch and turns to be kissed, and Joe kisses her, expecting the fire of alcohol to flow from her mouth into his, but it’s just her tongue sweeping his.

“What?” Marisol says.

“I thought you were going to share.”

“Dahlink,” she says in her Zsa Zsa accent, “you don’t remember I’m a swallower?”

Joe remembers. Remembers a blow job doing eighty down the Outer Drive on the first night he met her at the Surf, a bar on Rush where she worked as a cocktail waitress; remembers the improv theater he’d go see her in at a crummy little beatnik space in Old Town where sometimes there were more people onstage than in the audience; just say something obscene about Ike or Nixon or McCarthy and you’d get a laugh — shit, he laughed, too. He remembers the weekend right after he got the Bluebird when they dropped its top and drove the dune highway along the coast of Indiana to Whitey’s so-called chalet on the lake, water indigo to the horizon, and night lit by the foundries in Gary.

“So, luvvy, is here where we’re spending our precious time?” Marisol asked, turning on the radio.

Joe shifted through the gears as if the alleys were the Indianapolis Speedway and pulled up to Bruno’s. He left Marisol in his idling car, singing along with Madame Butterfly on the opera station, while he ran in for a fifth of Rémy, her drink of choice, then brought her back to his place.

“Where’s all the sheets and towels?” she asked. “Joe, how the bloody hell can you live like this?”

“They’re at the Chink’s. I been meaning to get them, but I been busy.”

“You better watch it before you turn into an eccentric old bachelor, luv. I think maybe you’re missing a woman’s touch.”

That was all she had to say, touch , and they were on the bare mattress.

Her blouse, an old white shirt of his, came undone, and he pressed his face to her breasts, anointed with layers of scent, lavender, jasmine, areolas daubed with oil of bergamot, nipples tipped with a tincture of roses. He recalled the single time she’d invited him to her place on Sedgwick and how, in her bedroom, a dressing table cluttered with vials and stoppered bottles smelled like a garden and looked like the laboratory of a witch. Touch , she said, and he straddled her rib cage, thrusting slicked with a bouquet of sweat, spit, and sperm between perfumed breasts she mounded together with her hands. A woman’s touch .

When he woke with Marisol beside him it was night and his room musky with her body — low tide beneath the roses. An accordion was playing. It sounded close, as if someone in the alley below was squeezing out a tune from long ago. “Hear that?” he asked, not sure she was awake.

“They’re loud enough to wake the dead,” Marisol said. “When I was little I used to think they were bats and their squawks were the sonar they flew by.”

“I didn’t mean the nighthawks,” Joe said. “Those new mercury vapor lights bring the bugs and the bugs bring the birds. Supposed to cut down muggings. Or at least line the pockets of a few contractors. I had to buy fucking venetian blinds to sleep.”

“You need earplugs, too,” Marisol said. She rose from the dark bed and crossed through the streaky bluish beams, then raised the blinds. The glare bestowed on her bare body the luster of a statue. “Liking the view in the vapor lights?” she asked. “Ever think of a window as an erogenous zone?”

“Always the exhibitionist,” Joe said. “But why not? You’re beautiful as a statue.”

“Statues are by nature exhibitionists, even when they’ve lost their arms or boobs or penises. Where’s your mirror? I want to watch statues doing it in mercury vapor.”