Suck Life
The body is a tool for the performance of duty.
Hard-tempered (work, work, work)
eyes crusted, static self
sucked like motes into a static screen.
Money is beauty.
The body must be draped upon the sofa after.
Two hours, at least,
steeped in lukewarm TV.
Massaging lover's feet if you've got the money
(hands upon her tummy).
If not, drink beer. If you're a single male,
fuck a lot.
No? Read magazines. Spend time with loved ones.
Do not be afraid. Every moral has a story
(every story's a moral),
every life has some suck.
Sometimes fingers itch for the earth
(they say: work, work, work),
the threaded aroma.
The body wants to work that threaded aroma.
To suck life from the land of its birth.
Two Worlds Touch
Sun will sink to sea, as all things light must too-soon go, leaving only traces where two come together. Heat lingering in the sand
before the tide rises.
The rough shutters at the end of the bed open onto an unreal twilight, the indistinct place where night and day mix like dreams into reality. In the scant hours before dawn or the nightfall,
two worlds touch.
Between mind and mind there is space for souls to mingle, breath within breath, smell within smell, two old things become a little new. A poem you wrote comes back to you in another form.
At water's edge I always hear the murmuring of lovers' voices long gone. I watch the tide pull grains of white away, erode the land beneath my feet. The sea smells of dreams, beauty, and melancholy. Waves forever break themselves against the rocks.
In another place in another time, beside the fire in deep unreality's heart, I will not need to speak those words. By then,
we will be strangers again.
Want another? http://www.wm.edu/so/manque/archives/2a/poetry/anthem_reprise.htm
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Apologia for a Man-Bag
In his pockets: wallet, phone, a pen, coins, an iPod, a brochure with the address of his guesthouse. In his hands, a diary, a camera, an alpaca-wool sweater too hot to wear after 10 a.m. He juggles these things to open the cathedral door. Lays them beside him on the pew. Sweat dries in the ancient air, motes of dust illuminated in colored light flowing through stained glass.
Cool again, he ties his possessions into the sweater and returns to the street. He scans the plaza for pickpockets, thinks that he might as well change his name to Mark. “Chicharrones, chicharrones, chicharrón!” yells a hawker from the shade of the cathedral. Beside him, a woman selling stone sculptures. Beside her, a man beckons.
“You need a bag,” the man says in Spanish. “If your hands are full, people are going to rob you,” he explains slowly, as if to a child. His front teeth are broken, and he has dirt under his fingernails. “This bag is pure alpaca wool. See? The design is well-typical. A Cusqueño shepherd’s pattern. Fifteen soles.” He pays ten. To him, it is three dollars. To the other man, it is a chicken and five kilos of white rice.
The sweater and its contents go into the bag, and then the wallet, phone, pen, coins, iPod, and the bag buttons closed. With his free hands he walks and reads the brochure. With free hands he examines the sculptures. They are made of adobe, not stone.
With free hands he enters the alley market safely. Drives a motorbike, carries his coffee through the streets. With his bag he can carry extra pens, sunscreen, a novel, more brochures. On the beach, the bag is a pillow. With free hands he climbs through the fog into a city lost in the mountains.
He puts his memories inside, and carries them back to America.
“Faggot,” jokes the friend who picks him up at the airport. “Only two kinds of people wear purses: bitches and faggots.” He is speaking English with a North American accent.
They go to a bar to get drunk. “How do you expect to get laid wearing a purse?” says a drunk girl he’s just met. He looks around the bar. The men wear their jeans too large, hanging below their waists. How would they run away if they were attacked? A young black guy is wearing a bag over one shoulder, but it has a picture of Michael Jordan on it, so no one worries. The women carry very small purses, all with the same design. Louis Vuitton. Imitation or the real thing, he can’t tell the difference. He tells the girl, “Compartimos tú y yo una sangre y una cara pálida, pero llevo en mi bolsa otros almas, vidas distintas.” She seems afraid, and backs away. Later, she makes out with his friend by the toilets.
Walking home alone, he sees a man slap his woman, and gives that man more of a beating than is reasonable. Later he finds that all of his possessions are still in his bag, and drops of blood have soaked into the wool.
In New York City, no one looks twice at his bag. Why would they? Here the faggots wear skin-tight leather vests, have tall green Mohawks. The Latinas approach him when he carries it. They say it reminds them of their homes. It reminds him of a city lost in the fog. When they speak, he drinks in their accents. He is not one of them, but until he stops carrying the bag, nor is he a gringo.
Cool again, he ties his possessions into the sweater and returns to the street. He scans the plaza for pickpockets, thinks that he might as well change his name to Mark. “Chicharrones, chicharrones, chicharrón!” yells a hawker from the shade of the cathedral. Beside him, a woman selling stone sculptures. Beside her, a man beckons.
“You need a bag,” the man says in Spanish. “If your hands are full, people are going to rob you,” he explains slowly, as if to a child. His front teeth are broken, and he has dirt under his fingernails. “This bag is pure alpaca wool. See? The design is well-typical. A Cusqueño shepherd’s pattern. Fifteen soles.” He pays ten. To him, it is three dollars. To the other man, it is a chicken and five kilos of white rice.
The sweater and its contents go into the bag, and then the wallet, phone, pen, coins, iPod, and the bag buttons closed. With his free hands he walks and reads the brochure. With free hands he examines the sculptures. They are made of adobe, not stone.
With free hands he enters the alley market safely. Drives a motorbike, carries his coffee through the streets. With his bag he can carry extra pens, sunscreen, a novel, more brochures. On the beach, the bag is a pillow. With free hands he climbs through the fog into a city lost in the mountains.
He puts his memories inside, and carries them back to America.
“Faggot,” jokes the friend who picks him up at the airport. “Only two kinds of people wear purses: bitches and faggots.” He is speaking English with a North American accent.
They go to a bar to get drunk. “How do you expect to get laid wearing a purse?” says a drunk girl he’s just met. He looks around the bar. The men wear their jeans too large, hanging below their waists. How would they run away if they were attacked? A young black guy is wearing a bag over one shoulder, but it has a picture of Michael Jordan on it, so no one worries. The women carry very small purses, all with the same design. Louis Vuitton. Imitation or the real thing, he can’t tell the difference. He tells the girl, “Compartimos tú y yo una sangre y una cara pálida, pero llevo en mi bolsa otros almas, vidas distintas.” She seems afraid, and backs away. Later, she makes out with his friend by the toilets.
Walking home alone, he sees a man slap his woman, and gives that man more of a beating than is reasonable. Later he finds that all of his possessions are still in his bag, and drops of blood have soaked into the wool.
In New York City, no one looks twice at his bag. Why would they? Here the faggots wear skin-tight leather vests, have tall green Mohawks. The Latinas approach him when he carries it. They say it reminds them of their homes. It reminds him of a city lost in the fog. When they speak, he drinks in their accents. He is not one of them, but until he stops carrying the bag, nor is he a gringo.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Secrets
Every Sunday her mother and grandmother meet at her aunt’s house, where Marion has been living for the past six months. They come to smoke cigarettes at the kitchen table and bicker over trivialities ten years dead, to size up the products advertised on TV and, in the same tone of voice, to discuss their men. Marion sits in the living room, still in sight and in earshot, but far enough away that she’s not expected to participate in the constant harangue. Instead, she rips pictures from her aunt’s interior design magazines, constructing piece by piece the home she’ll one day build or discover.
Six months of Sundays means Marion’s seen her mother two dozen times since she lost her job. Her mother has been clear-eyed each one of those times. Affectionate. Because she’s not exhausted from trying to stay sober all week. She has another job, but nothing has changed. The man who moved in last month smells of cigarettes and gin, like Marion’s stepfather did. He hasn't been around long enough to have caught on to her mother's secret.
After she washes the dinner plates, Marion tells them she’s heading out to buy eggs for the morning. Her mother knows she’s lying. Her mother always knows, because she’s based her life on just the same kind of plausible excuses. Her aunt thanks her. She's married to a Christian evangelist, and describes herself as being “born again.” She’s up to a pack and a half a day, but alcohol, drugs, and sex are Satan’s tools. At seventeen, Marion would prefer a life of sin to a life lived in a smoky room, ripping pictures from magazines.
Her mother doesn’t say anything except, “be careful.” Gives Marion five bucks. Stays behind to take shit off of her mother and sister. In a small way, one she won’t recognize until well after her mother’s funeral, Marion loves her for this. Loves her and hates her, for giving her too much freedom.
The sun has already fallen behind the rooftops. Marion’s aunt lives closer to the outskirts of town, in a neighborhood of three-story rowhouses with a good slice of purple sky. Marion stands in the mouth of an alley, smoking and watching the sky grow darker. Slowly, she drifts away from her life, and towards herself. No matter, that if her aunt smells the smoke, she will kick Marion out of her house. No matter that her grandmother is dissolving into dementia, each day becoming a little more hostile and paranoid. No matter that there are fresh bruises in the crook of her mother’s elbow.
No matter that this drifting dulls her, limits her in some vague way. That the smoke she exhales each time is her soul, and she watches it dissipate, slowly turning into nothing. She feels this like a little daily suicide, but the smoke makes it easier to sit, flipping through magazines, surrounded by bitter voices and floral print wallpaper.
At her feet, something remarkable is happening. There is a trickle of water running down the alley, and directly in front of her it is flowing to either side of a little island of sandy gravel. Around this island, bubbles run downstream on one side, then change direction and just as easily glide upstream on the other. Each time a bubble comes to the end of the island, it hooks around and begins to climb the hill. Bending down with her face nearly to the asphalt, Marion can see little slivers of black gravel likewise carried in the current, first downhill, then up, circling around the island. Moving against gravity.
The day before, her boss walked in on her smoking in the walk-in freezer, and Marion had held her breath, fighting the paranoia, nodding at curt instructions until she could escape with a bag of shredded mozzarella. She isn’t addicted. She just likes being high when no one else is. During school, at church, while grocery shopping. It makes things a game where she has to convince everyone that she is as normal as they are. That she can act like them, feel like them, and all the while carry a secret self inside. Something that sets her apart. She has this in common with her mother.
The drifting away is the other important part. The calmness. And the fact that for all the things that stop mattering, new things begin. All of a sudden the purple slice of sky matters. The island in the stream, with bubbles flowing uphill, against all reason. The fact that she is the only one who has seen it. The night is full of small, secret worlds.
The flow of water grows, pulling the little island apart one granule at a time. The sky is getting purpler and purpler. She smells her hands. They reek. She decides to take a bit of a walk. To air out. How stupid, to risk getting kicked out of her aunt’s house. But no matter. She follows the stream uphill through the alley. It is May. The trees the city planted, some little ones, have white flowers on them. People’s window boxes are full of flowers, all different kinds, their colors muted in the dark. This is a quiet neighborhood, a safe one, except for a few things. One of these things happened to a girl at her school, a girl Marion sort of knows. She keeps her eyes up. Walks fast and avoids people. But tonight there is no one around, so she walks slowly, looking for islands in the swelling stream.
The water turns a corner. Like it’s a car or something. Takes a left out of the alley and heads up the middle of the street where the pavement has collapsed on itself. Nowhere near the drainage grates. Marion walks on the sidewalk. On the hill, people’s windows are at eye-level. Yellow kitchens, blue bedrooms. Old people, young people, laughing people, yelling people. People watching TV. Their slackened faces reflect the muted colors of high drama. Of comedy.
The water is coming from the neighborhood on the other side of the overpass, where people have lawns and fences. That neighborhood goes uphill, as well, with a stone retaining wall like a pedestal beneath the whole thing. The stream keeps getting bigger. Too big to be someone washing a car. Maybe someone has opened a hydrant?
The water goes right, Marion goes left. They go the same way. Backwards through time. Forwards through time. Or both. She’s not sure. Around a third corner she follows, up another alley, between the stone walls with the picket fences on top. Five houses up, a surprisingly skinny hose is sticking out from under one of the fences. The water pouring into the alley, still in the shape of a tube, hits the pavement with the sound of somebody getting smacked, except constantly.
She stands in front of what she was looking for. Someone emptying out their swimming pool. The hose looks like it’s peeing into the street. She closes her eyes and listens. Beneath the water, bats are also looking around with their ears. An owl hoots once, but no more. Minutes later, a wind chime speaks, and likewise goes silent. Power lines are humming electric Om.
She opens her eyes and bends down beside the flow of water to wash her hands. It is cold, much colder than the air. This water has not seen the sun all winter. Marion wonders if that makes it clean or dirty. How much darkness and how many chemicals can bacteria stand before it is all wiped out? It takes the smell off of her hands, though. Now they smell completely neutral. This water is dead. Clean.
It is fully dark out. Soon she will have to go into a store, and under fluorescent lights find a carton with its eggs unbroken, then convince the store clerk that she's no threat to anyone, or to herself. But for now the night hides her. It will keep her secrets.
Six months of Sundays means Marion’s seen her mother two dozen times since she lost her job. Her mother has been clear-eyed each one of those times. Affectionate. Because she’s not exhausted from trying to stay sober all week. She has another job, but nothing has changed. The man who moved in last month smells of cigarettes and gin, like Marion’s stepfather did. He hasn't been around long enough to have caught on to her mother's secret.
After she washes the dinner plates, Marion tells them she’s heading out to buy eggs for the morning. Her mother knows she’s lying. Her mother always knows, because she’s based her life on just the same kind of plausible excuses. Her aunt thanks her. She's married to a Christian evangelist, and describes herself as being “born again.” She’s up to a pack and a half a day, but alcohol, drugs, and sex are Satan’s tools. At seventeen, Marion would prefer a life of sin to a life lived in a smoky room, ripping pictures from magazines.
Her mother doesn’t say anything except, “be careful.” Gives Marion five bucks. Stays behind to take shit off of her mother and sister. In a small way, one she won’t recognize until well after her mother’s funeral, Marion loves her for this. Loves her and hates her, for giving her too much freedom.
The sun has already fallen behind the rooftops. Marion’s aunt lives closer to the outskirts of town, in a neighborhood of three-story rowhouses with a good slice of purple sky. Marion stands in the mouth of an alley, smoking and watching the sky grow darker. Slowly, she drifts away from her life, and towards herself. No matter, that if her aunt smells the smoke, she will kick Marion out of her house. No matter that her grandmother is dissolving into dementia, each day becoming a little more hostile and paranoid. No matter that there are fresh bruises in the crook of her mother’s elbow.
No matter that this drifting dulls her, limits her in some vague way. That the smoke she exhales each time is her soul, and she watches it dissipate, slowly turning into nothing. She feels this like a little daily suicide, but the smoke makes it easier to sit, flipping through magazines, surrounded by bitter voices and floral print wallpaper.
At her feet, something remarkable is happening. There is a trickle of water running down the alley, and directly in front of her it is flowing to either side of a little island of sandy gravel. Around this island, bubbles run downstream on one side, then change direction and just as easily glide upstream on the other. Each time a bubble comes to the end of the island, it hooks around and begins to climb the hill. Bending down with her face nearly to the asphalt, Marion can see little slivers of black gravel likewise carried in the current, first downhill, then up, circling around the island. Moving against gravity.
The day before, her boss walked in on her smoking in the walk-in freezer, and Marion had held her breath, fighting the paranoia, nodding at curt instructions until she could escape with a bag of shredded mozzarella. She isn’t addicted. She just likes being high when no one else is. During school, at church, while grocery shopping. It makes things a game where she has to convince everyone that she is as normal as they are. That she can act like them, feel like them, and all the while carry a secret self inside. Something that sets her apart. She has this in common with her mother.
The drifting away is the other important part. The calmness. And the fact that for all the things that stop mattering, new things begin. All of a sudden the purple slice of sky matters. The island in the stream, with bubbles flowing uphill, against all reason. The fact that she is the only one who has seen it. The night is full of small, secret worlds.
The flow of water grows, pulling the little island apart one granule at a time. The sky is getting purpler and purpler. She smells her hands. They reek. She decides to take a bit of a walk. To air out. How stupid, to risk getting kicked out of her aunt’s house. But no matter. She follows the stream uphill through the alley. It is May. The trees the city planted, some little ones, have white flowers on them. People’s window boxes are full of flowers, all different kinds, their colors muted in the dark. This is a quiet neighborhood, a safe one, except for a few things. One of these things happened to a girl at her school, a girl Marion sort of knows. She keeps her eyes up. Walks fast and avoids people. But tonight there is no one around, so she walks slowly, looking for islands in the swelling stream.
The water turns a corner. Like it’s a car or something. Takes a left out of the alley and heads up the middle of the street where the pavement has collapsed on itself. Nowhere near the drainage grates. Marion walks on the sidewalk. On the hill, people’s windows are at eye-level. Yellow kitchens, blue bedrooms. Old people, young people, laughing people, yelling people. People watching TV. Their slackened faces reflect the muted colors of high drama. Of comedy.
The water is coming from the neighborhood on the other side of the overpass, where people have lawns and fences. That neighborhood goes uphill, as well, with a stone retaining wall like a pedestal beneath the whole thing. The stream keeps getting bigger. Too big to be someone washing a car. Maybe someone has opened a hydrant?
The water goes right, Marion goes left. They go the same way. Backwards through time. Forwards through time. Or both. She’s not sure. Around a third corner she follows, up another alley, between the stone walls with the picket fences on top. Five houses up, a surprisingly skinny hose is sticking out from under one of the fences. The water pouring into the alley, still in the shape of a tube, hits the pavement with the sound of somebody getting smacked, except constantly.
She stands in front of what she was looking for. Someone emptying out their swimming pool. The hose looks like it’s peeing into the street. She closes her eyes and listens. Beneath the water, bats are also looking around with their ears. An owl hoots once, but no more. Minutes later, a wind chime speaks, and likewise goes silent. Power lines are humming electric Om.
She opens her eyes and bends down beside the flow of water to wash her hands. It is cold, much colder than the air. This water has not seen the sun all winter. Marion wonders if that makes it clean or dirty. How much darkness and how many chemicals can bacteria stand before it is all wiped out? It takes the smell off of her hands, though. Now they smell completely neutral. This water is dead. Clean.
It is fully dark out. Soon she will have to go into a store, and under fluorescent lights find a carton with its eggs unbroken, then convince the store clerk that she's no threat to anyone, or to herself. But for now the night hides her. It will keep her secrets.
Monday, May 7, 2007
New Moon
Maya’s boyfriend died of a diabetic heart attack on a cruise ship about halfway between New York and Bermuda. At the time, she was watching a stand-up comedian in the captain’s lounge. When she came back to the cabin he was unconscious, pale, rigid. She called the ship’s doctor, watched as they defibrillated him. The spikes on the electrocardiograph, peaking, falling, peaking, going flat. Each time she thought he’d pop up, smile his oblivious smile, tell her not to worry. He’d be fine. But instead, deferential apologies, a visit from the captain, a change of plans. They’d unload the body at Hamilton. Maya could fly home from there.
Thirty minutes later, she was standing on the deck again. She tried to picture his face, alive, but it was jumbled up with the comedian’s red hair under the spotlight, baked Alaska being wheeled through a darkened room. The stars. From the Bronx you could see about six stars. Here on the sea, they hung in clusters all the way to the horizon. A new moon, which means no moon at all.
No more Karl. Some men, young, tan men of the type hired as deckhands by cruise lines, had come to carry away the body. They’d brought a body bag stamped with the company name in small white letters. They'd steered Karl around the corner, and then he was gone. The captain had said his piece, and by the time he’d excused himself there was nothing left of Karl but an unmade bed. His clothes erupting from a too-small suitcase. One of his hairs left on the white pillow. At the time she’d wished he’d died at home. Then there would have been more left of him.
She slept on a plastic lounge chair that night, woke up a hundred miles south of where she’d fallen asleep. The early morning was a hundred miles warmer. Fresh and free of exhaust. Car horns. The Russian baker and his wife’s constant harangue. Reguetón. Instead, a fistful of diamonds scattered over the water where the sun was rising. Old men and their wives, jogging or walking the mile-long circuit from bow to stern. Gulls wheeling in their wake, feeding on the steady stream of garbage and the chunks of fish churned up by the propellers.
When a swarm of children invaded the pool area, Maya wandered off towards the bow. Southwards. Away from the landlord. Maybe the cruise line’d refund Karl’s half of the money. Beneath the sound of the wind and the gulls, she could hear the steam press exhaling like some huge, discontented animal. The same sound her boss made when she asked for time off. Southwards, towards the airport. Both directions led back to work.
She went for a massage and fell asleep on the table. Raisin-Bran for breakfast, then a cheese Danish and then a Spanish omelet and two cups of coffee. She changed into her bathing suit and laid by the pool. No one knew who she was. Some people smiled. Isn’t this great? The children went on screaming, and doing cannonballs into the water.
Instead of lunch, she took driving lessons from the ship’s golf pro. Ball after ball with a crack launched to hang like lint on the sky, then fall with an inaudible plop. Out of sight, the ball kept on sinking. To the bottom of the sea. The pro said she’d have a good swing, if not for the tension in her shoulders. He recommended a massage, and another lesson on the trip home. He offered to give her the massage himself.
She slept on a deck chair again that night. Getting off the boat the next morning, the captain pulled her out of the crowd. “Here is the newspaper clipping about your husband’s death.” She didn’t bother to correct him. “Show it to people in town. They will be kind to you.” The phrase didn’t sound quite right. She listened to see if the captain had an accent as he gave her directions to the American embassy. Because Karl had died in international waters, the State Department would have to certify his death. On paper, he was still alive.
The teaser on the newspaper clipping said that Karl was the cruise line’s first death. But they’d had a body bag. There must be a law about that, too. Did they have a freezer reserved for storing the dead, or had they just put him in there with the lobster tails and kegs of beer? If she asked about the laws on refunds for dead boyfriends, would they tell her?
Hamilton was too short to be called a city, but with too much traffic to call it a town. Two-story buildings painted in pastels. Shopfronts displaying jewelry, souvenirs. It should have been peaceful, but instead the narrow streets were crammed with the clatter of mopeds and little Renault taxis. Maya folded back her tongue to whistle one down, stopped with four fingers stretching sunburned lips. Cracking open her skin. She felt the cool morning broken by traffic. At her feet, two suitcases. Across the street, a moped rental shop. ‘If they’ll hold Karl’s bag, I’ll go for a ride. If they won’t, I’ll go straight to the embassy.’
The tattooed man at the bike shop looked her over, asked what a so-pretty girl was doing in Bermuda by herself. She explained, showed him the newspaper clipping. “Condolences, love,” he said. Sure he’d watch her bags. A long drive sometimes did the trick for him. “You’ll be careful,” he said, like a question.
The main road around the island passes through Hamilton from east to west. On either side it winds uphill and carries on along the cliffs over the sea. Maya headed right. Uphill. Out of town. Within a mile, trees hung over the road, grew right up the mountain, and the mountain went right down into the sea. She thought she’d never seen so much green. And blue. The sky was just everywhere, all around her. And the sea laid out flat, like a carpet. Blue-green, greenish blue. Like a carpet with a handful of diamonds scattered across it.
The red moped struggled at the crest of the hill. She stopped. From there the city seemed a quiet thing, like the bones of a whale beached and bleached upon the shore, too big to roll back into the sea, so instead painted for some indecent festival. She could see her ship, carrying five thousand living souls, and one dead one. Inside, maybe a single hair sat on a starched white pillow, depending on what time the maid had started work. Away to the north were New York, her landlord, her boss, Karl’s mother. She’d most likely blame Maya. For the heart attack. For the diabetes.
‘I don’t really want to have a baby,’ she thought. That surprised her. She and Karl had been planning to start a family immediately after the wedding. He was already 46. Getting old. Maya was 28. She’d thought she wanted to grow his baby. Feed him, clothe him, teach him. All that work. And what for? So he could grow up to work at a dry cleaner’s? So he could brave the difficulty and disappointment of a whole life for the sake of one sunny, sad day?
She took off her helmet and sat for hours, watching the sun rise over the flat sea. Later it would fall. Someday, a long time from now, she’d be someone else. She’d have other thoughts than these. Maybe she would be married to someone she hadn’t met yet. Have kids who were a mix between herself and this hypothetical stranger. Maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she’d never remember this afternoon. Maybe she would, and she’d look back just once as this other Maya, and recognize a fondness she doesn’t now feel mixed in with all the regret she does.
Someday she’d die. At least she could count on that. On being dead for a long, long time.
Diamonds scattered in careless handfuls. The smell of the sea, and the sky was just everywhere.
Thirty minutes later, she was standing on the deck again. She tried to picture his face, alive, but it was jumbled up with the comedian’s red hair under the spotlight, baked Alaska being wheeled through a darkened room. The stars. From the Bronx you could see about six stars. Here on the sea, they hung in clusters all the way to the horizon. A new moon, which means no moon at all.
No more Karl. Some men, young, tan men of the type hired as deckhands by cruise lines, had come to carry away the body. They’d brought a body bag stamped with the company name in small white letters. They'd steered Karl around the corner, and then he was gone. The captain had said his piece, and by the time he’d excused himself there was nothing left of Karl but an unmade bed. His clothes erupting from a too-small suitcase. One of his hairs left on the white pillow. At the time she’d wished he’d died at home. Then there would have been more left of him.
She slept on a plastic lounge chair that night, woke up a hundred miles south of where she’d fallen asleep. The early morning was a hundred miles warmer. Fresh and free of exhaust. Car horns. The Russian baker and his wife’s constant harangue. Reguetón. Instead, a fistful of diamonds scattered over the water where the sun was rising. Old men and their wives, jogging or walking the mile-long circuit from bow to stern. Gulls wheeling in their wake, feeding on the steady stream of garbage and the chunks of fish churned up by the propellers.
When a swarm of children invaded the pool area, Maya wandered off towards the bow. Southwards. Away from the landlord. Maybe the cruise line’d refund Karl’s half of the money. Beneath the sound of the wind and the gulls, she could hear the steam press exhaling like some huge, discontented animal. The same sound her boss made when she asked for time off. Southwards, towards the airport. Both directions led back to work.
She went for a massage and fell asleep on the table. Raisin-Bran for breakfast, then a cheese Danish and then a Spanish omelet and two cups of coffee. She changed into her bathing suit and laid by the pool. No one knew who she was. Some people smiled. Isn’t this great? The children went on screaming, and doing cannonballs into the water.
Instead of lunch, she took driving lessons from the ship’s golf pro. Ball after ball with a crack launched to hang like lint on the sky, then fall with an inaudible plop. Out of sight, the ball kept on sinking. To the bottom of the sea. The pro said she’d have a good swing, if not for the tension in her shoulders. He recommended a massage, and another lesson on the trip home. He offered to give her the massage himself.
She slept on a deck chair again that night. Getting off the boat the next morning, the captain pulled her out of the crowd. “Here is the newspaper clipping about your husband’s death.” She didn’t bother to correct him. “Show it to people in town. They will be kind to you.” The phrase didn’t sound quite right. She listened to see if the captain had an accent as he gave her directions to the American embassy. Because Karl had died in international waters, the State Department would have to certify his death. On paper, he was still alive.
The teaser on the newspaper clipping said that Karl was the cruise line’s first death. But they’d had a body bag. There must be a law about that, too. Did they have a freezer reserved for storing the dead, or had they just put him in there with the lobster tails and kegs of beer? If she asked about the laws on refunds for dead boyfriends, would they tell her?
Hamilton was too short to be called a city, but with too much traffic to call it a town. Two-story buildings painted in pastels. Shopfronts displaying jewelry, souvenirs. It should have been peaceful, but instead the narrow streets were crammed with the clatter of mopeds and little Renault taxis. Maya folded back her tongue to whistle one down, stopped with four fingers stretching sunburned lips. Cracking open her skin. She felt the cool morning broken by traffic. At her feet, two suitcases. Across the street, a moped rental shop. ‘If they’ll hold Karl’s bag, I’ll go for a ride. If they won’t, I’ll go straight to the embassy.’
The tattooed man at the bike shop looked her over, asked what a so-pretty girl was doing in Bermuda by herself. She explained, showed him the newspaper clipping. “Condolences, love,” he said. Sure he’d watch her bags. A long drive sometimes did the trick for him. “You’ll be careful,” he said, like a question.
The main road around the island passes through Hamilton from east to west. On either side it winds uphill and carries on along the cliffs over the sea. Maya headed right. Uphill. Out of town. Within a mile, trees hung over the road, grew right up the mountain, and the mountain went right down into the sea. She thought she’d never seen so much green. And blue. The sky was just everywhere, all around her. And the sea laid out flat, like a carpet. Blue-green, greenish blue. Like a carpet with a handful of diamonds scattered across it.
The red moped struggled at the crest of the hill. She stopped. From there the city seemed a quiet thing, like the bones of a whale beached and bleached upon the shore, too big to roll back into the sea, so instead painted for some indecent festival. She could see her ship, carrying five thousand living souls, and one dead one. Inside, maybe a single hair sat on a starched white pillow, depending on what time the maid had started work. Away to the north were New York, her landlord, her boss, Karl’s mother. She’d most likely blame Maya. For the heart attack. For the diabetes.
‘I don’t really want to have a baby,’ she thought. That surprised her. She and Karl had been planning to start a family immediately after the wedding. He was already 46. Getting old. Maya was 28. She’d thought she wanted to grow his baby. Feed him, clothe him, teach him. All that work. And what for? So he could grow up to work at a dry cleaner’s? So he could brave the difficulty and disappointment of a whole life for the sake of one sunny, sad day?
She took off her helmet and sat for hours, watching the sun rise over the flat sea. Later it would fall. Someday, a long time from now, she’d be someone else. She’d have other thoughts than these. Maybe she would be married to someone she hadn’t met yet. Have kids who were a mix between herself and this hypothetical stranger. Maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she’d never remember this afternoon. Maybe she would, and she’d look back just once as this other Maya, and recognize a fondness she doesn’t now feel mixed in with all the regret she does.
Someday she’d die. At least she could count on that. On being dead for a long, long time.
Diamonds scattered in careless handfuls. The smell of the sea, and the sky was just everywhere.
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Black Coffee in a Porcelain Bowl
Coming down from the mountains exhausted, skin brittle with cold and his eyes gone squinty from staring over fields of ice. In the town there is heat, noise, the endless traffic of things and people. He works towards the plaza. Short, dark people inquire of him with short, dark glances. They are a race of traders known for the ability to measure value at a glance.
In the alleys off of the plaza he identifies the guesthouses not by the wooden placards, but by the air of weary excitement. The people who stay here have been to this city before, but not so many times that their feet can carry them without their eyes’ advice.
At one guesthouse he shows his money to the man behind the counter. The man sneers. What is he to do with foreign currency? At the next, a little girl points at the amulet he wears around his neck. It is a charm against evil spirits, given to him by a woman who’d said that he had a knack for attracting demons. He takes off the amulet and hands it over to the girl, who disappears behind a curtain of beads. In a moment, her mother appears and leads him into a hammam. She takes off his shoes, washes and massages his feet. The little girl brings mint tea. Exhaustion reaches up through his feet, expands outwards from his belly.
The next morning he awakes confused by white sheets and sunlight filtered through yellow curtains. He smells soap and lilacs. How long since he slept in a bed?
In the garden he sits with his face to the sun. The mother brings him black coffee in a porcelain bowl. She meets his eyes for a moment, smiles shyly, and is gone. The little girl points at his belt. He got this belt on the other side of the ocean, traded a money clip and a bar of chocolate for it.
This city is like many he’s seen before. In the plaza men sell tapestries, copper jewelry, sweetmeats and brightly colored songbirds in small cages made of split reeds. He trades a half bottle of asprin and a pen for a bag of tobacco, a heavy wool sweater for a new pair of leather boots. With another trader he changes his money, which he uses to buy iodine, dried fruits, cotton socks.
Passing by the guesthouse, he sees the owner beckon. She guides him, without touching, to a table in the garden. Her daughter brings mint tea. The mother brings beef, rice, lentils and sliced tomatoes. He eats, rolls a cigarette, lets the sun enter through his face. When the woman returns, he offers her a handful of coins. She smiles and meets his eyes, shakes her head no. He leaves one of the larger coins on the table before he goes.
The next morning, rain drumming on the tin roof. Lilacs and ozone. The traveler laces his new boots. Black coffee in a porcelain bowl, and the woman speaks to him in her own language. “I slept very well, thank you,” he replies. She nods. Yes, I understand you. The daughter points at his silver ring. It, too, was given him as a gift, but he can no longer remember by whom. Possibly it is from Barcelona. Maybe from Delhi.
She pockets the ring and shows him a deck of cards. “Okay,” he says, and she sits and begins solemnly to explain the game. Her mother sees them playing and smiles at him, brings another bowl of coffee on a tray with sugar, warm milk, a filtered cigarette and a book of matches. “You know, I grew up in a town like this,” he tells the little girl. She nods yes, yes, I understand you, just play the game. He plays an ace, she takes it with a two. She smiles, and then begins wiggling a tooth, tells him in her language that it’s going to fall out. Yes, yes, I understand you. Rain on tin.
The next morning, more rain, and he pays with a digital watch. The next, with a stone carving he’d intended to bring home for his mother to put in her garden. The morning after that, the little girl shakes her head at a pewter bowl. No payment today.
On the first sunny morning, small eyes peep around the corner while he’s packing. When he returns to his room, towel around his shoulders, he sees that his boots are missing.
Black coffee in a porcelain bowl. Sugar, warm milk, a cigarette and a book of matches. “Your daughter stole my boots,” he says, pointing at his feet. The woman shakes her head, pretends not to understand. He points at his feet again, and the woman leaves, returns with her daughter who holds his large boots in her small hands. He reaches out for them, and she shakes her head. No. “They’re mine,” he says. “Me.” He points at himself. “Boots, me.” She shakes her head no. He looks at the woman. She says nothing. Smiles, rests her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. He understands, but pretends he does not. “Boots, me,” he says again, as if to remind himself.
On all sides of the traders’ city, mountains and snow. Here, lilacs and rain.
In the alleys off of the plaza he identifies the guesthouses not by the wooden placards, but by the air of weary excitement. The people who stay here have been to this city before, but not so many times that their feet can carry them without their eyes’ advice.
At one guesthouse he shows his money to the man behind the counter. The man sneers. What is he to do with foreign currency? At the next, a little girl points at the amulet he wears around his neck. It is a charm against evil spirits, given to him by a woman who’d said that he had a knack for attracting demons. He takes off the amulet and hands it over to the girl, who disappears behind a curtain of beads. In a moment, her mother appears and leads him into a hammam. She takes off his shoes, washes and massages his feet. The little girl brings mint tea. Exhaustion reaches up through his feet, expands outwards from his belly.
The next morning he awakes confused by white sheets and sunlight filtered through yellow curtains. He smells soap and lilacs. How long since he slept in a bed?
In the garden he sits with his face to the sun. The mother brings him black coffee in a porcelain bowl. She meets his eyes for a moment, smiles shyly, and is gone. The little girl points at his belt. He got this belt on the other side of the ocean, traded a money clip and a bar of chocolate for it.
This city is like many he’s seen before. In the plaza men sell tapestries, copper jewelry, sweetmeats and brightly colored songbirds in small cages made of split reeds. He trades a half bottle of asprin and a pen for a bag of tobacco, a heavy wool sweater for a new pair of leather boots. With another trader he changes his money, which he uses to buy iodine, dried fruits, cotton socks.
Passing by the guesthouse, he sees the owner beckon. She guides him, without touching, to a table in the garden. Her daughter brings mint tea. The mother brings beef, rice, lentils and sliced tomatoes. He eats, rolls a cigarette, lets the sun enter through his face. When the woman returns, he offers her a handful of coins. She smiles and meets his eyes, shakes her head no. He leaves one of the larger coins on the table before he goes.
The next morning, rain drumming on the tin roof. Lilacs and ozone. The traveler laces his new boots. Black coffee in a porcelain bowl, and the woman speaks to him in her own language. “I slept very well, thank you,” he replies. She nods. Yes, I understand you. The daughter points at his silver ring. It, too, was given him as a gift, but he can no longer remember by whom. Possibly it is from Barcelona. Maybe from Delhi.
She pockets the ring and shows him a deck of cards. “Okay,” he says, and she sits and begins solemnly to explain the game. Her mother sees them playing and smiles at him, brings another bowl of coffee on a tray with sugar, warm milk, a filtered cigarette and a book of matches. “You know, I grew up in a town like this,” he tells the little girl. She nods yes, yes, I understand you, just play the game. He plays an ace, she takes it with a two. She smiles, and then begins wiggling a tooth, tells him in her language that it’s going to fall out. Yes, yes, I understand you. Rain on tin.
The next morning, more rain, and he pays with a digital watch. The next, with a stone carving he’d intended to bring home for his mother to put in her garden. The morning after that, the little girl shakes her head at a pewter bowl. No payment today.
On the first sunny morning, small eyes peep around the corner while he’s packing. When he returns to his room, towel around his shoulders, he sees that his boots are missing.
Black coffee in a porcelain bowl. Sugar, warm milk, a cigarette and a book of matches. “Your daughter stole my boots,” he says, pointing at his feet. The woman shakes her head, pretends not to understand. He points at his feet again, and the woman leaves, returns with her daughter who holds his large boots in her small hands. He reaches out for them, and she shakes her head. No. “They’re mine,” he says. “Me.” He points at himself. “Boots, me.” She shakes her head no. He looks at the woman. She says nothing. Smiles, rests her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. He understands, but pretends he does not. “Boots, me,” he says again, as if to remind himself.
On all sides of the traders’ city, mountains and snow. Here, lilacs and rain.
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