Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 16 (9 page)

Nevertheless, his shoes had become so encrusted with tar that he was never able to scrub them clean.

II. True Love

"You will find your true love in the city.” This is what the young girls of the country tell one another in hushed voices so that their parents do not hear. The girls make secret pacts, sealed with blood and kisses, to leave home together when they come of age. These promises, like most, are soon forgotten by all but a few. It is these few who leave the country for the city. They find jobs and apartments, cats to name after their favorite drinks, shortcuts to sushi bars, and parking places that no one else even knew existed. But they never forget why they came to the city in the first place.

There was a young woman who came to the city and, to make ends meet, took a job at a copy shop. A man came into her copy shop every day. He wore a gray suit and carried a black briefcase from which he would take the papers he had her copy. He barely spoke and it was several weeks before she noticed him, and several weeks more before she began to expect him. One day she saw that the papers he gave her to copy were blank, and then she knew that he was in love with her.

Never let it be said that love is all in vain. The man found his voice, and soon they both were calling each other by pet names in public. A year flew by with walks in the park when the sun was out and movies when it rained. In the evenings, they would eat at the woman's favorite sushi bar and try to guess the occupations of strangers that walked by. On weekends, they would buy discounted day-of-show tickets, park at a convenient spot the woman knew that was always miraculously empty, and go to the theatre.

If love were simple, then this tale would be over. But one day, the man missed a date with the woman and, when she tried to call, she found that his phone was no longer in service. When she inquired around the city as to his whereabouts, she was only able to learn that he had quit his job and left with no forwarding address. She waited for a call or a letter from him. She invented reasons for why he might have gone. Sometimes she cried and at other times she bellowed in anger.

Still, he did not return.

The woman decided that perhaps a man's heart is an open book but, if so, then it is written in an alien language. This is what she told her friends over drinks, and they laughed and said that the city was making her bitter. She said no, just men.

Not long after that, while she was in the lobby of her apartment building, she noticed the postman sliding envelopes into the rows of postboxes that serviced the apartments. She admired the calm efficiency with which he performed his task. Looking at his face, she realized that he was a young man, not much different from her in age. Glancing downward, she saw that his shoes were encrusted with tar. Because she had a kind heart, even if outwardly bitter, she invited him up to her apartment for a snack while she tried to clean the tar off his shoes. On the way up in the elevator, they began to talk and they were still talking the next morning when the rising sun reminded them that they had to go back to work.

So the woman found her true love in the city and, if the two are not divorced, then they are married still.

III. As Above, So Below

The city is not one city but many. Beneath the city of men and women lies the city of the rats. The mayor of this city had a daughter who was considered entrancingly beautiful. She had dark eyes, long whiskers, a glossy brown coat of fur, and a pink tail that could circle her body twice around. Her father desired that she should marry a lawyer, a banker, or a businessman, professions that, in the city of the rats, refer to those who steal, store, and exchange the food and trinkets that they value so highly.

The daughter said that her husband could be as poor as a church mouse. She had but one requirement, that he not be boring.

Many suitors came to win her hand in marriage. They performed acrobatics, acts of ventriloquism, sang songs, and danced. They did complex calculations in their heads based on any mathematical question she might ask. They guessed the identities of playing cards hidden inside a cereal box. Some, it is true, even had help from the mayor, who hired acting coaches so that his business partners might appear in a better light. But nothing worked. The daughter would eventually raise a small well-formed paw to stifle a yawn, and the suitor would be dismissed.

One day a young rat came forward to beg audience with the mayor's daughter. He was not handsome, nor was he rich. But his eyes were bright and his paws were clean, as rats will say when they wish to say something nice about a poor relative. Moreover, the suitor said that he would not entertain before the mayor's whole entourage, but insisted upon entertaining the mayor's daughter in private. You can guess that tongues began wagging at that.

But the daughter, intrigued, reminded her father that she could more than take care of herself. The mayor did not answer. Instead, he scowled at the suitor for a full minute. He then laughed, for truly the suitor was of such nature that he would have difficulty inspiring fear in a mouse and, that being the case, how could he ever inspire love in his daughter's heart?

Once alone with the mayor's daughter, the suitor undid a large letter, still in its envelope, that he had been carrying.

"What is that?” asked the mayor's daughter.

"This,” said the suitor, his whiskers twitching, “is a story from the city of men and women."

The letter that the suitor read told of how a young man from the country fell in love with a beautiful country girl, but could only admire her from a distance. Whenever he tried to approach her, his legs would turn to lead and hold him fast to the ground. Any time she came near him, his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth such that he could not speak. Nevertheless, when she came of age and left home for the city, he followed her. There in the city, she, thinking that he was from the city, fell in love with him. He, playing the role of a man that she might love, found that he could finally talk to her. But, although he did not initially realize it, he was trapped. He could tell her nothing of himself, only of this person that he pretended to be. So he had spun more and more lies as to who he was and what he did. Finally, sick of the lies, he had fled the city to go back to his home in the country. Now that he had finally told the truth in this letter, if she still loved him, she could find him there in the country. If not, he would never bother her again.

The rat suitor folded the letter back along its original creases and returned it to its envelope.

"What happened next?” asked the mayor's daughter.

"That,” said the suitor, “is another story. In the city of men and women there are more stories than there are stars in the night sky or hairs on a healthy rat. Some stories are meant for a large audience. Some like this one were written for a single person. The woman for whom this story was intended never received it, and so you and I are the only ones who know it. But if you will invite me back for tomorrow, I will tell you another such story."

"Yes,” said the mayor's daughter. “Tomorrow. And tomorrow's tomorrow. And all the tomorrows thereafter."

If rats can marry, then they are married still.

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Dr. Frankenstein's monster wore Greedbok hightops, the only shoes that fit his size eighteen quadruple

E's.

Irregularly arched, he needed special support to keep his feet from turning inward.

"Pronation,” the Doctor said, shaking his head, and vowed to do better next time.

Meanwhile, Greedbok's funding of Frankenstein's research had an antidefamation clause.

The nameless monster loved his Greedboks.

External stitching and Promethean lightning bolts seemed significant to him, but he didn't know why.

When he learned they were made in Indonesian sweatshops by workers earning $2.00 a day, his great heart broke, but he couldn't give them up, swearing to wear them

'til their soles died and their tongues fell apart.

No longer believing in a future formed and favored by the fruits of benevolent technology, the motherless monster became depressed.

"Could be bipolar disorder,” Frankenstein muttered.

The monster overheard and set out for the North

Pole instead.

"Better to be a frozen stiff than a capitalist shill,"

he thought.

Quarter past Finland, Frankenstein caught up with him.

"Wait! Wait!” Frankenstein shouted.

"It's true, Greedbok pays forty cents an hour but the local standard is twenty.

They're really quite enlightened, their publicist says."

The monster turned back and settled down in Lapland.

Naming himself Bok the Unconquered, he became labor negotiator for disfranchised reindeer.

"Pack animals suffer as much as third-world wage slaves, but cannot speak for themselves,” he wrote.

Now he wears self-made felt boots and leggings;

his Reeboks hang in a special place in his tent.

Finally he seems content. Good shoes have given him sole and eyes and tongue but the heart has always been his.

A Hermaphrodite at Menopause

I was always androgynous—a pretty boy, a handsome girl, sliding easily between the sexes coming—up and out in the best of both worlds, strength and agility for quarterback, breasts and hips for cheerleader, too;

then the years of father/motherhood, nurture and nature necessarily nested within the bloodtides of the moon.

I was myself, circled but undefined by stereotype, so when the change overtook me in a burn of hot flashes, a haze of ill health, a wheel of seasons when nothing worked,

I was loosed from the hormones of female attraction and became crone/codgered, my body softened like an old cushioned chair, an unassuming fringe of gray mustache.

Now that I'm ripe for grandparenthood, the urge to procreate once again consumes me.

Grandma's teacup is empty, but

Grandpa's pipe still rises to the occasion.

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John Kessel

The red phone rings. You pick up the receiver. “Hello?"

A woman's voice. “I want to speak with Edwin Persky."

"Just a minute.” You put her on hold, then punch in the letters: P-E-R-S-K-Y. The sound of a phone ringing. A woman answers. “Hello?"

"Edwin Persky, please."

"Hold on."

She puts you on hold and leaves you listening to a pop orchestral recording of “Try to Remember” while she connects with Persky. Pretty soon she's back. “This is Edwin Persky,” she says. “What can I do for you?"

You go back to the woman on hold, and say to her, “This is Edwin Persky. What can I do for you?"

The woman's voice becomes seductive. “I want to have sex with you."

You switch back to Persky's interlocutor. “I want to have sex with you."

She speaks with Persky, then relays his response. “What are you wearing right now?"

Back to woman one. “What are you wearing right now?"

"I'm wearing black lace panties and a garter belt. And nothing else."

You wish these people would show a little more imagination. And why the garter belt if she's not wearing hose? You can see her as she really is, sitting in her kitchen wearing a ragged sweatsuit, eating cookie dough out of a plastic container.

You tell Persky's rep: “I'm wearing black lace panties and a garter belt. And nothing else."

"Jesus,” she sighs. Something about the way she sighs conveys more intimacy than you've felt from anyone in six months. A shiver runs down your spine.

She relays the come-on, then replies. “I'm taking off my pants. My mammoth erection thrusts out of my tight boxers. I fall to my knees and rub my three-day growth of beard against your belly."

You pass along the message. Cookie-dough woman says, “I come down on top of you and take your organ into my mouth. My tongue runs over the throbbing veins.” It's too much. “Don't say that,” you tell her. Say, “I grab the term insurance policy from off your cluttered desk and roll it into a tube. I place the tube over your dick, put one end into my mouth, and begin humming ‘The Girl from Ipanema.’”

"The Girl from Ipanema?’ What's that?"

"Don't worry. Just say it."

The woman hesitates, then says, “I grab the insurance policy—"

"—term insurance."

It takes her three tries to get it right. You pass it along to Persky's rep.

"That took a while,” she says, after she passes it on. “At least it's original."

You snicker. “I had to help her. What's Persky doing?"

"I expect he's whacking off. Shall we speculate?"

"So does he have a reply?"

"Let's see—'I'm thrusting, thrusting, into your red mouth. I pinch your nipples and'—Jesus, I can't say this. Tell her he says, ‘I smear warm guava jelly over your perky earlobes while transferring three hundred thousand in post-coital debentures to your trust fund."

"Debentures—I like that."

"Thanks,” she says.

You relay the message to cookie-dough woman. She replies with something about waves of pink pleasure. You don't bother to get her on board this time, as you tell Persky's interlocutor, “I double your investment, going short Euros in the international currency markets while shaving your balls with a priceless ancient bronze Phonecian razor of cunning design."

She comes back: “My amygdala vibrates with primal impulse as the sensory overload threatens to reduce my IQ by forty points."

Now this is what you call action. And a challenge. You are inspired, and come back with a fantasy about Peruvian nights and the downy fur of the newborn alpaca. It goes on like this for a while. Cookie-dough starts gasping, and the pauses between Persky's replies stretch. Soon his interlocutor and you have time on our hands.

"Are you working this Tuesday?” you ask her.

"No. You?"

"Nihil obstat. Take in a movie?"

"Sounds good. I'm Janice."

"Sid. Meet me at the Visual Diner on McMartin. Seven-thirty?"