Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

Midday. He hikes the hill path through the lemon groves. A snake slithering into shadow inscribes in cursive an undecipherable message in the dust. Ravens, gowned for graduation, take flight, and he pauses before the tire track he’d caught them studying, a staff on which white stones are arranged like notes. A melody he’d hum if he could read music.

Later, in a tiled courtyard called Palm Passage, he sits at a café table, sipping rum mixed with iced espresso. If he still had his father’s penknife, he’d carve his name on the green coconut that has rolled beneath his chair — or, if not his name, then the name he heard them calling while he swung, a name he’s since assumed.

Instead, he writes a letter. It’s unaddressed. Are letters to no one inescapably written to oneself? To the self yet to be?

Those questions are how the letter opens. A chameleon skitters over the page and stops to do push-ups. They’re part of the letter. Caught in a sudden updraft, hibiscus blossoms tumble across the tabletop. They’re part of the letter, too, as are the rustling shadows of palms. As is what’s missing — the accents he fails to mark, diacritical marks that should hover above each sentence like birds above a horizon. The language here is inflected even when written down, a language he invented but cannot control. It has assumed a life of its own.

He’ll weight the page with a tip in foreign coins whose worth he’s still not sure of, and leave what he’s written for the rain to punctuate. The tip is for the young waitress with the sweating pitcher. Each time she leaned over the table to fill his water glass, her breasts, loose in a scooped-neck white dress, were revealed. When she caught him looking away, she smiled, her amused eyes a match for the sea beyond the platinum sand. He suspects that, like him, she’s a stranger here.

Beyond the bird-flocked horizon, distant thunder grumbles, but in Palm Passage it appears as if there’s already been a tropical downpour. The tiles are puddled where he surreptitiously emptied the water glass that she repeatedly filled. How thirsty he must have seemed. He’s memorized her small nipples, nipples the reddish shade of bricks, and filed them carefully among a short inventory of secret glimpses: the breasts of singing mermaids that flashed like fish scales as he swung over the sea, the blur of the bathing nymphs he ran past in the forest long ago, the shadowy, plum-dark nipples of his step-aunt, who walked the clock-resounding, candlelit corridors in a muslin chemise, murmuring aves. Her hair, shorn in the convent, was growing out.

How does a woman come to renounce her beauty?

He remembers thinking, If I were a girl, I’d look up her blowing dress. The thunder rumbles closer, and he remembers the exhilaration of swinging through the rain.

She brings the letter to his room as if she’s come to deliver it. Sunset/sunrise rays through the louvers. The hazy shadow of the overhead fan makes her white dress appear to whirl slowly.

She says, “‘It’s raining hibiscus,’” and he’s not sure how to respond. “‘Head full of light and rum,’” she says, “‘beneath the shadows of palms I was feeling ecstatic over nothing.’” She isn’t speaking, but reading aloud, quoting the letter. “‘Eyes blue-green as sea, and nipples — what is the color of sunlight on bricks?’”

It’s not what he remembers writing, but he doesn’t deny it. It’s what he might have written, what he wanted to write. The language with a life of its own is rewriting the letter, rewriting the story of his life. It’s a landscape of inflection they inhabit, a mercurial trill of echo and shadow, the accents traced along the spine with a fingernail as the words are whispered against an ear. At the eye of a private hurricane, an overhead fan draws her white dress over her head. Oh, Lordy, they begin to swing, a rhythmic momentum passing between them that threatens to fly out of control, and when she kneels, he clutches her hair, divides it into braids, and, in the whirring silence, holds on.

guilt and desire, thought and act, déjà and vu , between ampersand and cross, wing and air, all she made possible and all she made impossible, between river and eel, loving and leaving — a life like the exhalation that separates wine and whine — between mute and mime, between the rhyme of night and light, dream and waking from a nap in the afternoon darkness of what could have been a total eclipse but actually was an April thunderstorm, I thought the sound of men lifting long lengths of rain gutter from a pickup truck was a meteor shower rattling against the metal awning over Sun’s Oriental Food Store.

You ever had a boyfriend kissing your booty?

Girl, I never had no boyfriend who wasn’t kissing my butt.

No, girl, I mean really kissing it.

Yeah, well, men are dogs. They want a sniff.

Kissing it all over.

Pass me that catsup.

All over. Like French kissing, you know what I’m saying? I got to spell it out for you, girl?

You the one bringing it up. At the dinner table.

I’m just curious to know you ever had a boyfriend like that? And this is coffee break not no dinner, for some of us at least.

Was a manner of speaking. We at a table. How’s your catsup technique? I hate when it’s a new bottle. One good splat and your food is like road-killed.

I got to go make a call. See you, girl. Them nasty jumbo fries gonna give you a jumbo booty.

Toujours pour la première fois

C’est à peine si je te connais de vue …

Professor Martino has written on a napkin: Always for the first time, I scarcely know you when I see you. The lines are by a French poet, but, Professor Martino thinks, Cole Porter might have written them. It is Martino’s practice when traveling to a foreign country to bring a book of poems and a dictionary in the language of that place. He sits in an orange plastic booth, drinking black coffee, with still three more hours to kill before a flight to Paris. He allows himself to regress in airports to the diet of a kid — cinnamon buns, caramel corn, soft-serve. He’s eaten the one Big Mac he’ll eat this year, while imagining the bistro food to come — Belon oysters, rabbit with green olives, champagne — and thinking about the woman with whom he hopes to share those meals. They are supposed to meet at a boutique hotel on the river near Saint Germain, and he can’t help worrying whether, even though it’s a hotel she has chosen, she’ll be there. He can’t help wondering, though it is none of his business, what excuse she’s made for the trip to her husband, whom she refers to by profession rather than name — the Frackologist.

Why stay with him? Professor Martino once asked.

Why do you think? she asked back, knowing he wouldn’t answer.

Ma femme à la chevelure de feu de bois

Aux pensées d’éclairs de chaleur …

The dictionary has femme as woman or wife; the translation has it as wife: My wife whose hair is a wood fire. Whose thoughts are heat lightning …

Martin prefers my woman.

Ma femme aux cils de bâtons d’écriture d’enfant …

My woman whose eyelashes are strokes of a child’s writing …

Cole Porter wouldn’t have come up with that.

The Frackologist is an executive with Halliburton who, she says, drank himself into a coronary before he became a cycling fanatic. He cycles on a recumbent bike before a wide-screen plasma television while watching classic boxing and at the end of his ride is soaked in sweat and panting like a dog.

My woman with buttocks of a swan’s back

With buttocks of spring