Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

And the sex of a gladiola …

Professor Martino is no longer consulting his French dictionary or writing lines on a napkin as if he is translating from scratch — he’ll do better with the menu in Paris — for now he reads in English: My woman with eyes of water to drink in prisons …

Panting like a dog, giving me those cocker-spaniel eyes, sniffing around me like a dog in heat are the ways she’s described the Frackologist. And, while Professor Martino has never heard her say men are dogs, when he catches the phrase from the booth behind him, he has an urge to turn, but doesn’t. He never gets a look at the woman whose boyfriend likes to root around, but after she leaves, Professor Martino hears her friend, the woman with the fries, shake the crushed ice in her cup, take a slurp of her drink, and then whisper aloud, “Whore.”

Down at the 43rd Precinct they know that fingerprints don’t lie. The detectives study the inky orbits their coffee cups stamp on blotters. They’ve seen it all. What’s loneliness compared to Missing Persons? Longing next to grand larceny? Love beside assault with a deadly weapon?

But even the clerks know that crimes of passion leave clues. Around midnight the report comes down from the boys in the lab: your fingerprints are everywhere — on doorknobs, glasses, mirrors, the shower stall, on the desktop when the lamp is lit, on the silent, cradled telephone, on the sleeping screen, and the keyboard — on each letter of the alphabet — on both sides of windowpanes among old prints of rain. It’s as if you needed to touch everything. Or maybe you were just being careless as usual, expecting, as usual, that we’ll all simply keep letting you go.

Her voice in the dark distilled his name down to a vowel until all that was left of it was breath shuddering over her teeth. He slid from her and they lay side by side without speaking.

“Sweetheart, I love your moans,” he whispered.

In the stillness of the silenced window fan he listened to her breathing evenly again, and wondered if she’d heard what he’d just told her or if she was already adrift in sleep.

“That’s good,” she answered, “I’m covered with them.”

“Covered with moans. That’s nice. Baby, you’re waxing poetic,” he said.

“Moans?” she asked. “I thought you said moles .”

“You thought I just told you that I love your moles?”

“It did sound a little odd,” she said, “but I figured, well, if that’s what he likes about me, fine.”

“That has to be a first. I bet no one’s used that line on you before?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?” she asked.

“I guess. I hope that at least you didn’t imagine I was talking about those little myopic rodents tunneling in the dark through your front lawn even as we speak.”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart. The front lawn is Astroturf. And of course I thought you were referring to the moles on my skin.”

“You were probably lying there thinking, dear Lord, there are leg-men and tit-men and booty-men and neck-men — a nation of men in Japan worshipping pinups of Audrey Hepburn’s neck — and hand-men and foot-men, as opposed to a footman, and no doubt shoulder-men and elbow-men and underarm-men and eye-, ear-, and nose-men, but I had to get involved with a mole-man?”

“Another rhetorical question?”

“It’s too long to be rhetorical,” he said.

“Then going back to your shorter rhetorical question about whether it’s a first? For me yes, but I had a friend, Diane, who had a spray of strawberry moles on her stomach that she was self-conscious about. She had a fling with a guy named Hunter, an art student who claimed he could paint dreams. He loved kissing her moles, which she’d only let him do in the dark. One night on hashish she asks what exactly about her moles attracts him, and Hunter tells her he believes that, if connected, her moles will spell out the secret name of her soul mate, or maybe even his still-hidden face. So, stoned, she agrees to let him connect her moles. By the light of a flickering candle he draws lines along her skin. When he’s finished, she winds herself in the sheet and stands before her mirror; he switches on the bed lamp and she opens the sheet. There’s no name, no face. Only lines scribbled across her stomach attached to what looks like random punctuation. She feels utterly foolish. I need to take a shower, she says, but he begs, Please come with me, and drags her into the backyard, him in jockey shorts, her in the sheet. The summer sky is full of stars. He points — There’s Betelgeuse, there’s Rigel. He’s obviously an amateur astronomer. He unwinds her sheet, spreads it on the grass, and she lies naked beneath the Milky Way while he compares the constellations to the moles connected on her stomach. It’s Orion the Hunter, he says. You know the myth? Orion was killed by an arrow shot by Artemis — the Romans called her Diana, the goddess of the hunt, whom Orion adored. Artemis placed his body in the night sky. You’re wearing Orion’s belt of stars.”

“Sweetheart, that is one weird story. Love is strange. So, what happened to Hunter and Diane?” he asked.

“They broke up after Diane had a dermabrasion. See, when it comes to loving moles, I don’t think it would be fair to categorize you as a mole-man. The bar for that is set too high.”

“What category do I fall into?”

“You’re more of a generalist,” she said. “Moles just happen to be included.”

“Every last one of them.”

She came over wearing a man’s white shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, and a faded blue denim jumper that made her eyes appear more blue.

“Look,” she said, sitting down on the couch and slowly raising the jumper, revealing a bruise high on the outside of her thigh.

It was summer. Bearded painters in spattered coveralls were painting the outside of the house white. Through the open windows they could hear the painters scraping the old, flaking paint from the siding on one side of the house, and the slap of paint-soaked brushes on the other.

“These old boards really suck up the paint,” one of the painters would remark from time to time.

“I’ve always bruised so easily,” she said, lowering her voice as if the painters might hear.

The bruise looked blue underneath the tan mesh of nylon. It was just off the hip, and above it he could see the lacy band of her panties. It was a hot day, climbing toward ninety, and as he studied the spot that she held her dress up for him to see, it occurred to him that even at this moment, it still might be possible for them to talk in a way that wasn’t charged with secret meanings. Not every day needed to be imprinted on their memories. The direction their lives seemed, uncontrollably, to be taking might be changed, not by some revelation but in the course of an ordinary conversation, by the twist of a wisecrack or a joke, or perhaps by a simple question. He might ask why she was wearing pantyhose on such a hot day. Was it that her legs weren’t tanned yet? He might rise from the couch and ask if she would like a lemonade, and when she said yes, he would go to the kitchen and make it — a real lemonade squeezed from the lemons in his refrigerator, their cold juice stirred with sugar and water, the granulated sugar whispering amid the ice, the ice cubes in a sweating glass pitcher clunking like a temple bell.

They could sit, sipping from cool glasses and talking about something as uncomplicated as weather, gabbing like painters, not because they lacked for more interesting things to talk about, but because it was summer and hot and she seemed not to have dressed for the heat.