Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

Of course it’s their own voices that are foreign here where they have no business, where they’ve arrived by accident — another in a succession of accidents between them, but, so far, an accident in which no one’s been seriously hurt. Even their laughter sounds foreign and out of place as they hike back from the café. She trails her fingers as if feeling her way along the rugged walls of the stone houses that line the unlit narrow street.

“Shhh,” they shush each other, and laugh.

“We have to keep it down,” he says. They stop and kiss hard as if to seal each other’s lips, dizzily lose their balance, and steady themselves against a wall. With her back braced, he draws her hips toward him, and their bodies press together.

“You’re not following your own advice,” she says.

“What advice?”

“To keep it down,” she whispers, and then bursts into tipsy laughter.

Above cratered cobblestones, the moon is a blank in a starless sky. When the café sign blinks out behind them, he tells her they must have entered the Dark Ages.

In the entire village, only a single streetlight above the fountain still burns. Its electricity seems an anachronism; it should be burning beeswax or whale oil or kerosene. Given the glare, they’re probably lucky their room doesn’t face the fountain. In the harsh yellow light, the fountain appears to be crumbling, fissured, eroded by its own gush of water. Each day, workmen patch the cracks and skim leaves and debris off the fountain pool with long-handled nets that look as if they’d be good for catching butterflies. But like a recurring troubled dream, after dark the cracks reappear and leaks spout and puddle the cobblestones so that it looks as if a rainstorm has just swept the square. Tiny tributaries, each with its own current, trace the sloping street down “the thousand steps.” Step by step, water trickles toward the village on the hillside below. Instead of a Fountain of Nymphs, that village is famous for the corpse of its patron saint, which refuses to rot. Given the choice between a village with a Fountain of Nymphs and a village with an incorruptible saint, they chose the fountain.

With the village shuttered, all sleeping except for the feral cats lapping from the fountain, who’ve now slunk away, she slips her sandals off, hikes her skirt, and wades into the pool. Spray plasters her blouse, she opens the buttons, her wet breasts gleam. He watches her standing with her throat arched back, and he’s glad they’ve come here for however long it lasts.

“Maybe we needed to feel foreign,” she told him in the café, “to find a place where there’s no way to be anything but strangers.”

“Have you ever had the feeling that you’ve become a stranger to yourself?” he asked.

“Could be a step in the right direction,” she told him.

Last night, he walked barefoot down a cobbled street, wearing a suit, a beautiful suit, no shirt, and carrying a cheap suitcase that clumsily resisted the powerful wind, though his body did not. He was going to the ferry even though he realized that in the distance the glittering ocean was actually the moon-glanced tile roofs of the other mountain village. Still, he proceeded until he gradually woke to her sucking his cock, and far off a dog barking, and they rose and opened the shutters and she braced herself against the sill while he entered her from behind, both of them lost in billowing white curtains, while she repeated, Don’t stop , and he wondered what dream she’d awakened from and if she, too, had lain in the dark thinking that they have to keep fucking because they are afraid of where they might find themselves if they stop.

He watches her and wonders how, when the village wakes to the familiar greetings of roosters and doves, it would appear to those born here to find her spray-drenched, half bare, waist-deep in the swirl, a stranger among the age-old, bare-breasted nymphs, pouring out their bottomless urns. Her arms are graceful like theirs, and for the moment, her eyes, like theirs, seem fixed upon some mystery only she can see.

“Look!” a child shouts. “The nymphs have come to life!” A crowd gathers in the square around the fountain. It’s not an apparition of the Virgin, but miraculous enough, and the villagers are ready for their village to have a miracle, too. Let the village below have their saint. Here, where marble has become flesh and blood, it’s time to welcome the return of the ancient deities.

But the nymphs are in no hurry for a reunion with mankind. They continue to bathe, staring off, detached from mortal life, unconcerned even as the fissured walls collapse and torrents flood the street, tumbling down the thousand steps, a waterfall that sends the men from the village below rushing into their cathedral, and carrying out their incorruptible saint, hoisted above their heads, while they pray aloud in an old dialect they remember but no longer understand — that no one, perhaps not even God, still understands.

In a slip that is the only thing pink about the day, she strains from the décolletage of a third-story window. Rain beats her with an intensity reserved for glass while she reels in the pulley line hand over hand, a shoulder strap down, a breast nearly slipping free as clothespins drop from between her teeth, just before she disappears into white furls, fighting in the sheets as the L streams by with its cargo of eyes.

All you’ll ever know of her is what you’ve already learned about hanging out wash.

In Genoa, as she packs to leave, he tells her that he doesn’t want it to end, and she replies that if he really knew what he wanted, she wouldn’t be leaving.

Alone, he continues on along the coast to Rome, and beyond Rome, to Sicily, with no particular destination in mind. Each day there’s another train schedule to unriddle, another line to stand in, another crowd to wait among. He’s no longer traveling to get somewhere. He’s bought a rail pass and is going places in order to ride the trains, to sit, if he can, in an empty compartment where he’ll slide down a window and let the gust of racing through Italy blow in his face. From a bench in a crowded station while announcements blare, or from a seat in a train whose rocking makes his handwriting look like a stranger’s, he composes a letter to her, as one might write a page in a journal. Back when they first met, they exchanged love letters, which they both have saved. The letters he writes to her now that she’s left him in Italy are about the places they meant to discover together, small towns whose names he’s given up memorizing, descriptions of weather, scenery, the food they’d meant to share. He writes to her each day, and each night in some new cheap hotel room by a train station he throws the letter away.

And then one day he declares a holiday from letter writing. He doesn’t bother to record sleeping beneath a crucifix for the first time since he was a child visiting his Catholic grandmother. He doesn’t describe the only hotel available — a converted convent — or how at five a.m., when the bells tolled in the steeple beside his narrow window, it sounded as if waiters carrying metal trays of glass dishes were crashing down flights of stairs. He woke, momentarily confused as to where he was, to the scent of incense from what must have been a mass, mixed with the smell of calamari frying in the kitchen. He doesn’t mention how he walked in the rain to the train station past trees that had assumed the same hunched posture as the street musicians who refused to stop playing. He doesn’t tell her that his mind is full of the melodies of what presumably are love songs whose names and lyrics he doesn’t know. A day goes by without his writing down a single word about all he’s seen. That night he has nothing to throw away.