Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

The heirs were selling off the furnishings. Gil browsed the sunlit rooms with no intention of buying anything, but in an upstairs bedroom he found an open wardrobe smelling of cedar. He held the trousers up before a full-length mirror that like everything else in the house wore a price, everything except the clothes — for those he’d have to bargain. His reflection, gazing back, fogged behind layers of dust, appeared ghostly. The trousers looked as if with a little tailoring they’d fit, and maybe he could wear them for cross-country skiing. How could he have known then that he was only at the start of something?

Lost: the hot-pink bullet from the spent cartridge of lip gloss he’s found lodged between gearbox and seat. And the beat she always caught, chasing from station to station as they raced between red lights. The scent of summer evaporating at noon — coconut, sweat, the salt lick of her skin scorched against turquoise vinyl. Evening’s perfume of broken heat, a tide of lawn sprinklers whipping through the dark as moons emerge: each neighborhood, each roof, each windowpane sending up its own. In the smaze of foundry chimneys, a tarnished spoon bent by telekinesis into a wedding band. Over a steeple, a halo missing a saint. Above the shimmering sweet-water sea, a tragic mask with a comic reflection. Or is it vice versa? There’s one un-self-conscious about its pitted face; one with its own star in Hollywood; and another aloof, back turned as if boycotting tomorrow, the way that Miles Davis, circa Kind of Blue , would turn his back on the audience when he’d solo. And in the rearview mirror where it’s always October, leaves blowing off like pages from an unfinished memoir …

“So, where to?” he’d ask.

“Baby, just drive.”

I never told this to anyone — there wasn’t anyone to tell it to — but when I was living with my uncle Kirby on the Edge — the edge of what I never knew for sure (“Just livin’ on the Edge, don’t worry where ,” Uncle Kirby would say) — a little bride and groom would come to visit me at night. Naturally, I never mentioned this to Uncle Kirby. He’d have acted as if I’d been playing with dolls. “A boy should play like the wild animals do — to practice survival,” Uncle Kirby always said. “You wanna play, play with your Uzi.”

The bride wore a white gown and silver slippers, and held a bouquet. The groom wore a top hat, tails, and spats. Their shoes were covered with frosting as if they’d walked through snow even though it was summer, June, when they first appeared. I heard a little pop — actually, more of a pip! — and there on my windowsill was the groom, pouring from a tiny champagne bottle. “Hi! I’m Jay and this is Trish,” he said by way of introduction, adding confidentially, “We don’t think of one another as Mr. and Mrs. yet.”

They had tiny voices, but I could hear them clearly. “That’s because we enunciate,” Trish said. She was pretty.

“It’s these formal clothes, Old Boy,” Jay explained. “Put them on and you start to speak the King’s English.”

I remember the first night they appeared, and the nights that followed, as celebrations — like New Year’s Eve in June. There’d be big-band music on my shortwave — a station I could never locate except when Jay and Trish were over — and the pip! pip! pip! of miniature champagne bottles. You should have seen them dancing to “Out of Nowhere” in the spotlight my flashlight threw as it followed them across the floor. I’d applaud and Jay would kiss the bride. But each celebration seemed as if it would be the last.

“Off for the honeymoon, Old Boy,” Jay would say with a wink as they left. He’d sweep Trish off her feet and carry her across the windowsill, and Trish would laugh and wave back at me, “ Ciao —we’ll be staying at the Motel d’Amore,” and then she’d toss her small bouquet.

I didn’t want them to go. Having their visits to look forward to made living on the Edge seem less desolate. Uncle Kirby noticed the change in me. “What’s with You , lately?” he asked— You was sort of his nickname for me. “I mean, why You goin’ round with rice in your pockets and wearin’ that jazzbow tie? And what’s with the old shoes and tin cans tied to the back fender a your bike? How You expect to survive that way when the next attack comes out a nowhere?”

I told him that dragging shoes and cans built up my endurance and the rice was emergency rations, and he left me alone, but I knew he was keeping an eye on me.

Luckily, no matter how often Jay and Trish said they were off, they’d show up again a few nights later, back on the windowsill, scraping the frosting from their shoes. And after a while, when they’d leave, walking away hand in hand into the shadows, Jay hooking his tux jacket over his shoulder rather than sweeping Trish off her feet, and Trish no longer carrying a bouquet to toss, neither of them would mention the honeymoon.

I didn’t notice at first, but gradually the nights quieted down. “A little more sedate an evening for a change,” Jay would say. Trish, especially, seemed quieter. She said that champagne had begun making her dizzy. After dancing, she’d need a nap.

“ I get no kick from champagne ,” Jay would tell her, raising his glass in a toast, “ but I get a kick out of you .”

Trish would smile back, blow him a kiss, and then close her eyes. While she rested, Jay would sit and talk to me. He had a confidential way of speaking that made it seem as if he were always on the verge of revealing a secret, as if we shared the closeness of conspirators.

“Actually,” he’d say, lowering his voice, “I still do get a kick from champagne, although it’s nothing compared to what I feel around Trish. I never told this to anyone, but I married her simply because she brought magic into my life. The most beautiful songs on the radio came after she turned it on. She made the ordinary seem out of this world.”

It wasn’t until the sweltering nights of late summer, when Jay and Trish began to bicker and argue, that I realized how much things had changed. The two of them even looked different, larger somehow, as if they were outgrowing their now stained, shabby formal wear.

“I’m so tired of this ratty dress,” Trish complained one evening.

“Now it’s nag nag nag instead of pip pip pip ,” Jay replied. “And please don’t say ‘ratty.’ You know how I despise the term.”

Jay would harangue us on the subject of rodents in a way that reminded me of Uncle Kirby on the subject of Commies or certain ethnic groups. Jay had developed a bit of a potbelly and looked almost as if he were copying Trish, who was, by now, obviously expecting. Expecting was Trish’s word. “Out of all the names they give it, don’t you think ‘expecting’ sounds the prettiest?” she’d asked me once, surprising me, and I quickly agreed.

Their visits had become regular, and they showed up, increasingly ravenous, to dine on the morsels I’d filched from the supper table at Jay’s suggestion. “Old Boy,” Jay had said jokingly, “you can’t just take the attitude of ‘Let them eat cake.’ After all, cake isn’t a limitless resource, you know.” I was glad to pilfer the food for them. It made mealtime an adventure. Stealing rations in front of Uncle Kirby wasn’t easy.

After I served their little dinner, they’d stay and visit. Jay would sit drinking the beer that he’d devised a way of siphoning from Uncle Kirby’s home brew.

“We could use a goddamn TV around this godforsaken boring place. It would be nice to watch a little bowling once in a while,” Jay would gripe after he’d had a few too many.