Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

Through the marbled glass of the bathroom window aglow three stories above the alley, none of the city is visible: not the squirrel sashaying along a wire, or the birds lifting into smoldering sky, or black roofs shiny with drizzle, or the man standing across the gangway, flicking the meteor of a cigarette over the railing. The woman in the shower has squeezed shampoo into the palm of her hand and works it to a lather in her brunette hair. Her arms, slender and graceful, rise above her head as she massages the shampoo into suds, and then she ducks her head beneath the drumming water. Suds stream down her steaming body. She has turned directly toward him. In a downpour, her cupped hands lather her small breasts.

“You’re going to leave your watch on?” she asks him, as if he’s guilty of an indignity on the order of disrobing down to all but his socks.

“You’re leaving on your cross?”

It’s not a question he’d have otherwise asked, especially given the way the cross — gold, delicate, and too tiny to crucify a God larger than an ant — brushes the pale slope of her left breast.

“If you’re leaving on your Old Spice,” she says.

“If you’re leaving on your mascara,” he says.

“If you’re leaving on your road-rash whiskers,” she says.

“And then there’s your gypsy earrings.”

“I’ve put them in the wineglass,” she says.

“But you’ve left the holes in your earlobes behind.”

“And what about your beeper?” she asks.

“Long gone.”

“Not if I can still hear it beeping in my mind, in my sleep, in my…”

“Fine. I’ll take care of it,” he says, “once you do the same with your concealed weapon.”

“First take off that wire,” she says.

“I will if you’ll remove that birthmark.”

“It’s a tattoo!”

“A tattoo. Of what?”

“Dark matter.”

“Hearts are out of fashion?”

“And when were you intending to take off that paper yarmulke?” she asks.

“It’s male pattern baldness,” he says. “My father’s began that way. In certain indoor lighting I’d think he was sprouting a halo.”

“As long as it isn’t tonsure,” she says.

“As long as we’re on the subject,” he says, “I’d really appreciate it if you’d remove that sinister, androgynous hand puppet.”

“You mean ‘ambidextrous,’ right? Because if there’s one thing Lil’ Martin is not, it’s ‘androgynous.’ And if Lil’ Martin goes, you have to lose the parrot. I don’t care how sensitive, needy, jealous, and neurotic, not to mention obscene, it can get.”

“Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight! You piece of shit vindictive bitch!”

“See what I mean?” she says.

“Well, so long as we’re on the subject, sweetheart, I’ve been meaning to mention that I didn’t appreciate it when your mother asked if I’d ever trained as a ventriloquist.”

“She was merely making conversation.”

“And darling, I wasn’t going to bring this up either, but since we’re being candid there’re the hair extensions, and the nail extensions, the braces, the Liz Taylor violet contacts, the disconcerting shadow of—”

She interrupts, “And I wasn’t going to bring up the full Groucho, but please, please, please,” she pleads, “even if I laughed at first, it’s not funny anymore, especially when you pick me up at the airport or we go out to dinner or a party. Darling, I swear I’ll strip off anything and everything to get intimate beyond your wildest fantasies if you’ll just remove that ludicrous Groucho.”

“My love, what Groucho?”

The tentative first snow has become a ticking sleet that despite its bone-chill looks molten in the streetlights. Their shoes — his high-tops, her purple suede boots — are soaked from the quest he’s led them on, up one slushy block and down another, since they were asked to leave the movie theater.

“Are we lost yet?” Gwen asks.

“Nothing looks the same in the snow. I swear there’s this neat coffeehouse with a woodstove around here,” Rick says. “I found it by smell last time.”

“If it’s someplace you used to go with Hailey, let’s forget it. Being there would feel creepy to me,” Gwen says.

“You think I’d drag us around freezing because I’m looking for a place I’d been to with someone else?”

“You’re right, you wouldn’t want to violate the sacred memory.”

“Jeez, you’re in a shitty mood. If you think it’s my fault getting us kicked out, I apologize.”

“I was in a great mood. What’s more romantic than getting eighty-sixed for public lewdness and stepping into the first snow of the year? I loved walking in it together. Who drew a snow heart on the window of a car, and who walked away before we could write in our initials?”

“Sorry, I was freezing. I’m not dressed for this. I need to keep moving,” Rick says. “Look, there’s something open. We’re saved.”

The restaurant’s windows are steamed opaque. Inside, an illegible sign diffuses pink neon across the slick plate-glass window and the Formica counter. There’s a scorched, greasy griddle smell. The few customers at the counter, all men, eat with their coats on. Beyond the counter are four empty Formica tables.

“I want to go on record that I have never been in this place before,” Rick says. “Nor will I ever be in this place again with anyone but you.”

“You say that now.”

“I’d never be able to find this place again if I wanted to.”

“How about by smell?”

They sit at the table farthest from the counter and wedge their chairs together to study the plastic menu. Gwen opens her Goodwill fur coat and Rick unbuttons his Levi’s jacket, but like the people at the counter, they keep their coats on. An overweight waitress in a food-stained white uniform, her face ruddy with broken capillaries, shuffles over on swollen legs to take their order. The waitress waits, regarding them through eyes outlined in tarry mascara. Sandra is stitched in red on her uniform above the droop of her considerable bosom.

“You kids need more time?”

“I think I’ll have hot tea instead of coffee,” Gwen tells Rick. “Can I just get a tea?” she asks the waitress.

“Sure can, hon,” Sandra says.

“Tea sounds right for the weather,” Rick says. “This may be another first. I don’t think I ever ordered tea in a restaurant.”

“What about a Chinese restaurant?” Gwen asks.

“That doesn’t count,” Rick says. “You don’t order. It just comes.”

“So, two teas?” the waitress asks.

“Two hot teas.”

“That it? Nothing to eat?”

“Crumpets, maybe,” Rick says. “Do you have crumpets?”

The waitress isn’t amused.

“Just the tea, please,” Gwen tells her.

“You got it, hon,” the waitress says, and writes down the order on her pad. “You want cream or lemon?”

“Lemon,” Gwen says, “I’d love some lemon.”

“Lemon for me, too,” Rick says.

The waitress writes it down.

“How about some honey?” the waitress asks her. “We got these little breakfast honeys for toast I could bring you.”

“Thank you so much,” Gwen says, smiling at Sandra, “just lemon’s fine.”

“She an old friend of yours, hon, a long-lost aunt, or maybe a fairy godmother?” Rick asks after the waitress shuffles off.

“She’s just being nice. She seems lonely. She’s probably the only woman in here most of the time. Maybe I remind her of someone.”

“Remind her of who?”

“How should I know? A daughter she never had. Or one she did, a love child who ran away from home and every time the door here opens Sandra thinks it might be her prodigal finally coming back.”