Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

The watch was from the thirties, with a Deco rose-gold face and a genuine alligator band complete with a tiny rose-gold buckle. Despite her nostalgia for that era, it obviously had not occurred to her that such a watch could have played a supporting role in one of those movies she loved: Cary Grant might have worn it to check if Katharine Hepburn was running predictably late. It was the kind of vintage watch that people assume must have a family history, otherwise why would one go through the trouble of winding it each morning? He’d been asked more than once if the watch had a sentimental value — if it had been passed down to him from his father or maybe his grandfather. When she asked if he was leaving it on, he considered for a moment telling her that the watch had belonged to his father and was the whole of the inheritance his father had left him.

That would have been starting off (if this was the start of anything) with a lie, the kind of finagling tale his father was infamous for. His father, a gambler — he referred to himself as a joueur —was a man who, if going to the track was impossible, would settle for bingo. He was still alive, a little demented — or was that just drink — and living in a retirement community outside Vegas. He had visited his father there once and the place struck him as a subdivision gated not to keep the riffraff out, but to keep its population of bookies, hustlers, and scam artists in.

He had actually bought the watch in a secondhand shop after an acupuncture session with Dr. Wu had left him euphoric. Dr. Wu was treating his spring allergies, allergies he’d inherited from his father along with a tendency to squander money as well as his given name, Julian. Like his father, he went by Jules; neither he nor his father could tolerate “Junior.” Dr. Wu’s office was downtown, and after treatment Jules would find himself at some pricey men’s store buying clothes he didn’t need. Perhaps Dr. Wu, in collusion with local merchants, was inserting a needle in a point that triggered buying sprees. One particularly radiant afternoon, Jules walked through downtown crowds feeling as if the vital force, qi, were emanating from his body. He noticed that women, and men as well, glanced as he passed as if the force were visible to them, too. On Jewelers Row, under the L tracks, he stopped before a window where a watch with a face the color of rose champagne caught his eye. An L train reverberated overhead like a drumroll. Until that moment he’d never considered buying a vintage watch, but suddenly he had to have it. When he entered the shop, the immediately attentive saleswoman stared at him in the way that people on the street had stared, while he described the watch in the window. “Yes, sir,” she said, “right away, sir,” and rushed to get it. Not until he saw himself in the mirror on the counter did he realize that Dr. Wu, who only an hour earlier had inserted a four-inch needle in the Baihui point at the top of Jules’s skull — a powerful point where all the yang energy of the body converges — had overlooked removing the needle, which was sticking from the top of his head like an antenna.

If Clair had noticed his watch in the bar, Jules would have told her how he had come to buy it, much as she had told him about the clear plastic umbrella. But now wasn’t the time to launch into a story.

“You’re going to leave your watch on?” she asked.

“You’re leaving on your cross?”

On a humid night when it’s quiet enough after a rain to hear the drainpipes dripping into the alley, a voice — if a moan can be called a voice — passes like vapor through the rain-plugged window screen. It’s only another night noise at first, inseparable from the static that passes for silence in a city — traffic, insects, nighthawks, leaking rain gutters, someone doors away playing a radio or practicing on a cello. But gradually the moan grows more insistent. There’s a rhythm to it that Marty begins to detect, a resonance in its tail of ragged breathing — and out of a half sleep Marty’s eyes open, alert in the dark, and he listens, alarmed.

Someone is hurt, the victim of a hit-and-run or a rape or a mugging, or someone is sick, or perhaps grieving, expressing each throb of a wound — a muffled, irrepressible cry, the mouthing of a single, aching, mournful vowel. Alarm is his first reaction and his second is a kind of paralysis, as he lies listening, realizing that if someone is hurt, it’s his responsibility to help. He doesn’t want to think of himself as one of those alienated people in cities who will trade off their humanity rather than risk getting involved. He needs to do something, at least to inquire if help is needed — a stranger coming to the aid of a stranger. Or could he be sued for trying to help? Maybe he should simply call 911 and let them handle it. But if he called, what would he tell them? Help, I think I hear someone moaning.

By now, Marty is totally awake, sweating, staring into the dark, straining to hear every nuance of the sound. It’s a woman’s voice. He’s sure of that. The moans have become steady, there’s almost a singsong about them, and something else — a throatiness that makes each moan more disorientingly familiar than the last, as if he’s gone from a hypnagogic dream directly to a déjà vu. Suppose it’s an auditory hallucination. But the longer Marty strains to listen, the more convinced he becomes that he is hearing the voice of the woman in the apartment one floor down from his, the shy-looking one who wears a Dodgers cap when she jogs — maybe she moved here from L.A. — the girl downstairs who would rather look away than nod hello, even though one day Marty went to the trouble of buying a Cubs hat and timing his trip to the mailbox in the lobby so as to be there when she came jogging in, her hair a little sweaty, her face flushed and more full of life than usual. He’d hoped that maybe the baseball hats would give them something to talk about, but she didn’t notice and jogged past him before he could say, How ’bout them Dodgers , or whatever he was going to say. He’d never rehearsed the exact words, just hoped that at the time he’d say something right, but she didn’t notice him any more than she seems to notice how alone she appears. It’s only the sound of her moaning that carries from her bedroom window a floor below, moaning in a steady chant which she can’t know has disturbed him. Like a voice crying alone in the wilderness, Marty thinks, and yet she’d be mortified to know he’s overheard her. He’ll never tell. It’s a secret he’ll keep safe from a world of predators. Everything’s all right, it’s none of his business, after all, he can simply lie back now, relax, and close his eyes, listening as her breath grows rapid, wilder, rises an octave then plunges to a guttural sigh — a sigh to which, tonight, he tries to time his own moan — before they both drop off to sleep.

“Do you fantasize about me?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said, not volunteering any more information.

“I have the oddest fantasies about what I’d like to do with you,” she said.

“Like what, for instance?”

“I want to shave you.”

“I want to shave you, too,” he said.

“Not that way,” she said. “I mean it. I picture you soaking in a steamy tub, a beautiful old claw-footer, and I lather your beard with a boar-bristle brush. I even know where they sell them — at Crabtree and Evelyn. Then you lie back and close your eyes, and with an old-fashioned straight razor that makes the sexiest scraping sound, I give you the best, closest shave you’ll ever have. Shave you clean and smooth and rinse your skin as if I’m your geisha.”

“Sounds nice,” he said, rather than tell her there was no way in hell she was getting near him with a razor.