Sweet Talk Page 7

  “No wonder you’re so thin,” Susu says to me. “You’re not eating anything.”

  “Maybe I need some silicone implants,” I say, and I am just mean and small enough to feel a thrill of pleasure when Susu looks back at her plate without smiling. Harvey gives me a warning look. Susu, I must remember, is not playing with a full deck this week. Apparently, this is her best culinary effort, and it has been offered as a peace token—Susu, the repentant crab-carrier trying to make amends with the other woman.

  “I was never pretty,” she says. “I always had these big hips and no breasts to go with them. Not like you, Angelina. You have a nice compact little figure.”

  “Yes, you do,” Harvey says to me. “And you have one, too. Both of your figures have always been very nice.”

  “You always lie,” Susu says. “You lie to make everybody feel good about you.”

  That is not true. In fact, Harvey never lies. He is simply one of those people who rarely perceive an inadequacy in another person. Right now I can see the old guilt resurrecting itself as I watch Harvey watching Susu over a shaker of Kraft cheese and a plate of soft white bread. He is about to take the blame once again for the failure of the marriage. I can see the tenderness in his eyes, the pity that will cause him to offer Susu a place to stay for weeks and weeks if that’s how long it takes her to find a job. She begins to cry, and Harvey reaches out to touch her hand.

  “Now come on,” he says in his beautiful voice.

  “Excuse me,” I say, although no one is listening. I leave the apartment and go back over to Lila’s.

  “He was always a sucker for the basket cases,” she says. “After her he went out with a sculptress who had had shock treatment and who used to send him obscene, jealous postcards at the office. Then he took up with a woman who ate only fruit and nuts and liked to throw drinks on other women at parties.”

  “Don’t you ever want to get married again?” I say. “Don’t you want to move into a little house with daffodils pushing up along the front walk in the spring?”

  “Listen, I have thousands of dollars’ worth of antiques and a good job. Things could be worse. I could be in love with a man like Harvey.”

  Every Sunday night Harvey and I watch the science program on the PBS channel. Tonight we are watching it on Harvey’s bed with the door closed and the volume turned up high, so that we cannot be overheard by Susu, who is pretending to read foreign-language fashion magazines in the next room.

  “She’s actually a sweet person,” he says. “She’s having a hard time thinking about her future.”

  “How can she think with a hairdo like that? Her brain never gets any light or air.”

  “Please,” he says. “Please, please, please.”

  Last week’s topic on the PBS program was atoms and quarks. This week the program is about the miracles of microphotography. Harvey and I watch with genuine fascination as a lens focuses on a human eyelid and magnifies it fifty thousand times to reveal that there are tiny, fish-shaped mites living between the hairs. The announcer says that these mites live on everyone.

  “See,” says Harvey. “We already had things living on our bodies.”

  In the next scene, the amazing lens focuses on a piece of ordinary bedroom carpet to reveal that in between the fibers there are thousands of living dust mites, each much smaller than the head of a pin. These dust mites, the announcer explains, are in all our homes. They subsist entirely on the cells of sloughed-off human skin. Harvey gets down on the floor and crawls around the bed on his hands and knees. He rests his chin on the sheets by my foot. “Skin,” he murmurs and kisses my little toe.

  “We can’t do anything before Monday or Tuesday,” I say, really just as a test of how much he wants me. “We all have to give our bodies another chemical shampoo before we’re safe.”

  He moves his head along my leg and kisses the inside of my thigh. “We can fool around,” he says.

  “Hello, hello,” a voice says from the other side of the door. “Anybody alive in there? Les personae morte?”

  “What language is it speaking?” I say.

  Harvey crawls to the door and opens it a crack. “I can’t find the detergent,” Susu says to me. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “Harvey is a dust mite.”

  “He was always like this, you know. So neat you could never find even the most common thing.”

  “Back in a second,” Harvey says as he stands up and steps into the hall. I notice that he shrewdly leaves the door open so that I can monitor the search for the soap. But Susu drops the subject of detergent as soon as they reach the kitchen and begins to tell another one of her third-person stories about life in Italy. In this one Susu goes riding on the beach on the Riviera although she has never been on a horse before. “So there goes Susu in her bikini and there goes Greggie galloping ahead of me.” I wonder whether Greggie is the one with the insect problem. On television the dust mites stand like tiny armadillos among colossal strands of shag carpet. In the kitchen Susu’s horse kneels toward the beach because he wants to take a sand bath. “ ‘Mi scuzi,’ I say to the Italians. I think the horse is dying. ‘Help, help!’ ” In this anecdote, Susu is the silly, helpless person who needs to be protected. I hear Harvey’s deep laugh, and I close the door and turn off the television. I get in bed as I hear Susu say, “Yes, I did, I did.” I put the pillow over my head. “I did. It was unbelievable.”

  I stretch over Harvey’s part of the bed and think of the dust mites alive all over the room. There must be whole families of them, generations and generations, living off the great god Harvey as his cells float through the air like manna. Probably after these last nine months a few colonies of Angelinites have sprung up, too. I wonder whether different species have grown dependent on different tastes—cells flavored by spaghetti sauce, or spilled alcohol, or chocolate syrup, perfumed cells from breasts and inner thighs—Chanel No. 5, L’Air du Temps, Heaven Scent—creamed cells from hands and faces, cells lathered thick with lipstick (these would be Susu’s cells), and maybe right now a whole race of dust mites is dividing itself into small communities and setting out in covered wagons for more fertile shag, and the community that has been subsisting on Pond’s Dry Skin Cream begins to die out when I switch, arbitrarily, to another brand. I can imagine the dust-mite priests down there pleading for cells saturated with lanolin, cornstarch, rosewater, building little fires, chanting beads, trying to make do with Oil of Olay cells, to which they are allergic.

  “Andiamo,” says Susu as I gallop toward sleep.

  It is 7 A.M. on Monday morning, and Susu’s underwear blooms around the bathroom like California poppies. There are scarlet-orange bras hanging from the towel racks, each bra cup stitched in concentric circles meant to suggest a target. There are scarlet-orange panties—some with cut-out crotches—dripping their color along the plastic of the shower curtain. And in the tub and sink there is more underwear seeping mauve into the sudsy water.

  “Where are the whips, Harvey?” I say when he comes to stand behind me in the doorway. “Where are the chains?”

  He laughs. “I thought she was doing this stuff last night.”

  “This does not look to me like the underwear of Emily Dickinson,” I say.

  “Shh,” he says, still laughing. “She’ll hear you.”

  “For God’s sake, it’s seven o’clock in the morning,” I say loudly. “Please tell Miss Frederick’s of Hollywood we would like to take a shower.”

  “Here is Miss Frederick’s in person,” Susu says, stepping between us into the bathroom. “Please excuse Miss Frederick’s if she has to wash the lice out of her clothes before she goes to her job interview.”

  “Everybody’s been excusing you for two weeks,” I say. “When are you leaving?”

  “Maybe we could all go into the kitchen and have some coffee,” Harvey says.

  “I gave you the only three thin years I ever had in my life,” Susu says to Harvey. “And what did you give me in return? You gav
e me lice.”

  I look at Harvey. “You had lice when you were married?” Harvey looks away.

  “He gave me lice last week,” Susu says and sits on the edge of the tub.

  “He couldn’t have given you lice,” I say. “He gave them to me.” But somewhere in the back of my head a camera lens is panning the landscape of my life, and a tree is no longer a tree but a place where other lives and whole worlds will be revealed if the eye looks closely enough at what’s under the bark.

  Susu begins to cry. “I had to put up with this for years,” she says. “You think you’re so special? You think you’re the only signorina on the block?”

  “I suppose now we’re going to have to hear a story about the virgin birth of the crabs,” I say. I feel that all my good qualities—restraint, perceptiveness, and the ability to handle bad luck—are being stripped away in a violent wind, and I am trying to hold everything together with a joke. I look toward Harvey, but he has slipped into another room. I sit on the edge of the tub and lean against the wet shower curtain. “It was my pal Lila,” I say. “Wasn’t it?”

  Here is what I do at work: I make small houses, office buildings, even airports. I also make streets, trees, shrubs, flower beds, ponds, streams, and miniature people. I work for a large group of architects, creating three-dimensional mock-ups of their designs. Harvey still talks about leaving the firm and going into business for himself. Lila is thinking about going back to graduate school in art history. Susu sells real estate but would rather have a job in broadcasting. I am the only person I know happy at work, except for a writer I met the other night at a party. He has pale green eyes and hair so thick it makes me think his brain must be a very fertile place. His name is Anthony, which is the name of the patron of lost things. An irony, since he owns so few of the things the rest of us seem to regard as necessities. He lives in a one-room apartment furnished in someone else’s taste.

  “I think he lives in his head,” I tell Lila. “I think in his head he owns stereo sets and three-piece suits and takes trips to Mexico in the winter.” Lila and I are sitting on one of her Persian carpets near a cherry cabinet full of beaded antique purses. It’s been two months since I stopped seeing Harvey, and now Lila and I are having drinks to demonstrate that we are still friends, as indeed we are. If I could choose to be someone else I might actually choose to be Lila, who is smart and beautiful, and whom everybody likes, but who seems to have found a way to close the door of this museum of an apartment and ignore the mucky terrain over which the rest of us must walk. For me the closed door is my work, where I create a stationary world, ageless and colorful, a shopping center or school no bigger than the top of a desk, and completely manageable.

  “Once a week he comes over here to tell me how much he misses you,” Lila says. She is talking about Harvey. I truly am not interested, so I turn and open the cabinet to look at the purses. Each purse is covered with glass beads and, I see, each bead is faceted so that it gives off many pinpoints of light. “He thinks that you’re perfect,” Lila says. “He thinks you’re a nice cross between Susu, who is crazy, and me. I’m much too independent for just about everybody.” We have already established that in Harvey’s life Lila occurred briefly between the sculptress and the fruit-and-nut woman, and that she reentered it briefly during the Susu-and-me period. I truly do not care, I told her. I now look back on those months as a phase of temporary insanity that began with an accident in a parking lot.

  “You can tell Harvey that I do not wish to be attractive to someone because of my characteristics as a hybrid.”

  “You’re crazy, too,” Lila says. “You’re a dreamer, you don’t have any courage.”

  “I’m not unhappy,” I say. “I’m fine.” All week long I have been working on the Janet Freeman Elementary School project, which may be the last elementary school built in California for a generation, now that the taxpayers have voted once again against education. This school will slide on Teflon joints during the earthquakes and will save all the children and the teachers. “Besides, I’ve just met this writer. He only owns seven shirts and doesn’t have any other girlfriends. He leads a simple life.” Already I can imagine the two of us moving to the country. Lila leaves the room to refill the drinks, and I turn back to the purses, where there are beads giving off light of every color, amethyst light and rose light, gold and platinum light, the silver light of oat fields in early summer, the coppery light of rivers stirring with mud after a spring thaw. Each bead twinkles like an eye, and it seems to me that if you could get close enough to one it would be like looking into a pupil to see your own reflection, and in the background there would be trees and hills and bridges, each bead different, here a mountainscape in the Himalayas, tiny goats grazing below the snow line, there a tropical shore in Rarotonga, pink orchids strewn across the sand, and always in the foreground, the oval face of Angelina.

  Kid MacArthur

  I grew up in the Army. About the only kind of dove I ever saw was a dead dove resting small-boned upon a dinner plate. Even though we were Protestants and Bible readers, no one regarded the dove sentimentally as a symbol of peace—the bird who had flown back to Noah carrying the olive branch, as if to say, “The land is green again, come back to the land.” When I was thirteen, my family moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, only a few weeks before the dove-hunting season opened. My father, who liked to tinker with guns on weekends, sat down at the dining-room table one Saturday and unwrapped a metal device called the Lombreglia Self-Loader. The Self-Loader was a crimping mechanism that enabled a person to assemble shotgun ammunition at home. “Save Money and Earn Pleasure,” the box label said. “For the Self-Reliant Sportsman Who Wants to Do the Job Right!”

  “If you can learn to handle this,” my father said, “you can load my shells for me when the hunting season arrives.” He was addressing my brother, MacArthur, who was ten years old. We pulled up chairs to the table, while my mother and grandmother remained near the light of the kitchen door. My father delivered a little lecture on the percussive action of the firing pin as he set out the rest of the loading equipment—empty red cartridges, cardboard wads, brass caps, a bowl of gunpowder, and several bowls of lead shot. He spoke in his officer’s briefing-room voice—a voice that seemed to say, “This will be a difficult mission, soldier, but I know you are up to the mark.” MacArthur seemed to grow taller listening to that voice, his spine perfectly erect as he helped align the equipment in the center of the table. My father finished the lecture by explaining that the smallest-size shot was best for dove or quail, the medium size was best for duck or rabbit, and the largest size was best for goose or wild turkey.

  “And which size shot is best for humans?” my grandmother said. She did not disapprove of guns, but she could rarely pass up a chance to say something sharp to my father. My grandmother was a member of the WCTU, and he was conducting this lesson in between sips of a scotch-and-soda.

  “It depends,” my father said. “It depends on whether you want to eat the person afterward.”

  “Well, ha, ha,” my grandmother said.

  “It is a lot of work trying to prize small shot out of a large body,” my father said.

  “Very funny,” my grandmother said.

  My father turned to MacArthur and grew serious. “Never forget that a gun is always loaded.”

  MacArthur nodded.

  “And what else?” my father said to MacArthur.

  “Never point a gun at someone unless you mean to kill him,” MacArthur said.

  “Excuse me,” my mother said, moving near the table. “Are you sure all of this is quite safe?” Her hands wavered above the bowl of gunpowder.

  “That’s right,” my grandmother said. “Couldn’t something blow up here?”

  My father and MacArthur seemed to have been hoping for this question. They led us outside for a demonstration, MacArthur following behind my father with the bowl of powder and a box of matches. “Gunpowder is not like gasoline in a tank,” my father said. He tipped
a line of powder onto the sidewalk.

  “It’s not like wheat in a silo, either,” MacArthur said, handing the matches to my father.

  “Everybody stand back,” my father said as he touched a match to the powder. It flared up with a hiss and gave off a stream of pungent smoke.

  We watched the white smoke curl into the branches of our pecan tree, and then my grandmother said, “Well, it surely is a pleasure to learn that the house can burn down without blowing up.”

  Even my father laughed. On the way back into the house, he grew magnanimous and said to me, “You can learn to load shells, too, you know.”

  “No, thanks,” I said. “My destiny is with the baton.” I was practicing to be a majorette. It was the white tasseled boots I was after, and the pink lipstick. Years later, a woman friend, seeing a snapshot of me in the white-braided costume, a sort of paramilitary outfit with ruffles, said, “What a waste of your youth, what a corruption of your womanhood.” Today, when I contemplate my wasted youth and corrupted womanhood, I recall that when I left high school I went to college. When MacArthur left high school, he went to war.

  It is nine years after the gunpowder lesson, and I am a graduate student teaching a section of freshman composition at a large university. On a bright June day, at the end of the school year, one of my students, a Vietnam veteran, offers to give me a present of a human ear. We are walking under a long row of trees after the last class of the term and moving into the dark, brilliant shadows of the trees, then again into the swimming light of the afternoon. We are two weeks short of the solstice, and the sun has never seemed so bright. The student slides his book bag from his shoulder and says, “I would like to give you a present for the end of the course.”