Ali Eteraz - Native Believer

Marie-Anne went to the gym downstairs. I imagined the two security guards ignoring her as she walked past. Once she would’ve been ogled, their eyes peppering her rump, her waist, the palpitation of admiration thrumming through their bodies, cocks. But that Marie-Anne was gone. Now she only had bloated elbows and folded shoulders. I pictured her walking, collapsed into herself, like she was seeking to disappear into some central cavity, calling herself the Michelin Woman, Pillsbury Doughgirl, Big Bertha. Despite her self-pity, I admired her. How could she keep going like that? Making one step follow another, and all with a smile on her face? I, meanwhile, felt broken if someone didn’t notice my new cuff links or a new haircut. Marie-Anne had an inner reservoir of survival that I didn’t. Where other people might have scattered, she became gathered. She made me wonder if there were two types of people in the world: the lakes and the sands. If so, I was among the latter, the lesser.

I went back to the kitchen and checked on the drinks, placing the bottles of Latour and Papé Clement in line with our egg-shaped bowls with beveled stems. I found a soft cloth and cleaned each glass thrice. Then I arranged the Belgian beers purchased at Monk’s near Rittenhouse, and removed every smudge from their surface.

Finally, there was the centerpiece of our wine collection, given to us as a gift by Marie-Anne’s father the last (and final) time he had come up from South Carolina: a single bottle of Cheval Blanc ’98. I wiped it down and pushed it to a more prominent position. Dr. Quinn had come alone, without his wife, Florence Quinn, who didn’t socialize with us.

I made one more sweep of the living room. Found a couple of inkless pens, a limp headband, and an unmarked bottle of pills. Vitamins by the look of them. I put everything on Marie-Anne’s desk.

It was cardio day for Marie-Anne. She came back within thirty minutes. Her round moon face, with its thickness across the neck and back of the head, was covered in a watery sheen. The cortisol spike had also made her hairier. The thick sideburns were like red steam shooting from her ears. Her scent had also thickened — a peppery ferocity. Since she started exercising her limbs had thinned out a little, but her middle was still expansive. She resembled a kind of sun-dried brick. But this was better than the ball she used to be before the exercise.

She gave me a peck on the forehead, put the poem in a scrapbook, and went to the shower. A few minutes later she came out wearing the tight purple sweater dress that I had laid out. She had added black stockings to it. She considered putting on a pair of boots and then dismissed the idea “since it’s my own house.” The dress was an old one, before “the great expansion” as she called it, and it was still a couple of sizes too small. I regretted my error. But I wasn’t about to suggest that she should change. I was still in love with her and enjoyed the gratuitous sight of her flesh. More flesh on your beloved was just more beloved flesh.

She stood in the doorway outside the second bedroom, which doubled as our study. I came up to her and touched her hip. She playfully pushed me on the chest. But as I was fading away she grasped me by the wrist and crushed me back into herself. She put her hand on the top of my skull and turned my head toward the room.

“What is that?” She pointed to the desk I had purchased in her absence.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s not a crib.”

She ignored my dig. “You got new furniture without checking with me? It looks expensive.”

My tone turned into a salesman’s. I walked up to the desk and waved my hand up and down its side like a showgirl. “Listen, Marie-Anne, just hear me out. Acquired in the heart of Philadelphia’s historic Antique Row, this desk, this tan burr walnut desk, represents a Southern revivalist strain of design. A triple-paneled leather top, and look, just look, at these piecrust edges. And the drawers, would you believe, they have swan handles. The whole thing rests on cabriole legs. Just imagine the history that sits in the soul of this desk. Imagine how much of America it has witnessed.”

She walked around it, trailing her finger behind herself like the train on a dress. “I like it.”

“Well, that was easy.”

“I’m easy when you persuade with Southern jingoism.”

“Does that mean that you’re about to go down on me?”

“No, Lord Dark Wind, I am not.” The nickname had a backstory. In the comics, Lord Dark Wind was the Asian scientist who injected adamantium into Wolverine’s body. Marie-Anne called me this whenever I requested fellatio because giving me head created a metallic taste in her mouth.

We headed into the living room and waited for the guests. Marie-Anne put Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes on the stereo and we stood by our tenth-floor window overlooking the southeastern edge of Fairmount Park. She hugged me from behind and we watched the snow spread over Philadelphia. Denuded trees, bereft of their vegetative ornaments, cowered in the wind. One tree, standing in the grove next to a town house, inscribed with a long knotted branch something invisible upon the glass.

I leaned back and let myself feel at peace. Maybe her good mood meant Marie-Anne would be able to impress George Gabriel a little. Maybe the social capital gained could bring an end to my career rut. Maybe a raise would follow. The extra cash would be nice, because for the longest time I had been raving about one of those retro-looking cast-iron stoves, the ones that came fitted with lava rocks, teppanyaki grills, and induction plates. My mouth drooled at the thought of the cooking that could be done on such a range.

Marie-Anne, meanwhile, went back to the bedroom and decided she was more comfortable in a long skirt and a long white dress shirt.

I heard her standing in front of the mirror, referring to herself as a polar bear.

* * *

It was the old secretaries of Plutus Communications — Danielle, Beatrice, and Connie — who were first to arrive. They had lived in the city all their lives and took our view toward North Philadelphia as an opportunity to talk about the city’s history. They panned their hands along the length of Girard Avenue and talked about when the black neighborhoods were white, before the Great Migration brought Southern blacks into Philadelphia.

“How’re y’all liking the food?” I asked.

Beatrice chuckled and fixed her horn-rimmed glasses. “I never got over how you still say that. Even after all these years with us Yankees. How long now?”

“Thirteen years since I left Atlanta,” I replied. “But why wouldn’t I talk like that? I was born in Alabama. Cow-tipping country.”

The laughter caused the briefly formed convergence to pulsate. I looked at Marie-Anne with concern in my eyes because no one else had shown up yet. She sensed my disquiet and squeezed my arm. I checked on the texts and e-mails. There weren’t any. Most of the people who I had invited, though familiar with me as a colleague, didn’t know me well enough to keep me updated about their arrival. I hadn’t even gotten RSVPs.

It took ten more minutes of nervous small talk with Danielle before someone else arrived. It was a group of three. Sam Arrington, Aaron Paul, and Mark Stark. They were associates, about four years my junior. I took their coats. They had heard about the party from one of the secretaries. They didn’t recall having met me; but I knew exactly who they were because I had been the one to orient them on their first day at work and I had an uncanny ability to remember the names of people who didn’t remember mine. Their coats smelled of dogs.

Carla and Jesse, two of the newest, came in next. They had found parking in a little row called Pig’s Alley and we laughed about the eccentric name. They stood and chatted with me until they realized that I was on Special Projects and not on a particular team, and they went off to merge with Sam, Aaron, and Mark.