Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me (23 page)

“Treats. Little
moules farcies
thing, secret recipe, brought with Momma Pappadopoulis from the old country. Eat up, they make you grow.”

She sat cross-legged, the skirt high but not high enough. Gnossos wondering about the dimension of her thighs, hoping for slimness, resiliency to the touch, tiny blond hairs, immaculate bevel. They touched glass rims and began. Silences then. Meal sounds: dishes clattering, knives scraping, wine gurgling out of bottles, toasted onion rolls opening, vine leaves sliding in sauce, broiled tomatoes squishing off skewers; Gnossos rising once to flip the record and bring in a salad chilled crisp with icecubes. The romaine and cucumber were dovetailed in a Radcliffe wastepaper basket, specially Brilloed for the occasion. Kristin watching every gesture, every step. Approving? “You know where meals are at, man?” he asked. “They’re what they leave out of flicks. The commonplace.”

“Like going to the bathroom?”

“You care for an insight? Life is a celluloid passion.”

“Pooh, honestly, you’re so busy thinking. Doesn’t it get you tired?”

He looked around the table he had been so careful to keep tidy. Each dish neatly stacked, each course in its place, no crumbs, no peelings, no bones, no slops. The blue and white tablecloth as immaculate as a foreign minister’s flag. He winked at Kristin, who was watching him carefully. Then lifted an urn full of salad dressing in his left hand and the nearly empty bottle of Greek wine in his right. A storm of cloudy residue swirled in both. With a flashing grin he turned them slowly upside down. He poured their heavy fluids all over the unviolated linen, painting like Jackson Pollock.

Later they waited by the fire. Cherry logs sputtered from the damp, hissed with wet little whispers that comforted their already humming ears. They sipped Cointreau from Wedgwood demitasse cups, nibbled chunks of feta from plastic toothpicks. The tablecloth was nailed over the plywood window, its fermenting images fixed in place by a quick coat of shellac. Gnossos had found the can in the hall closet and used it once before, to seal the sprung Captain Midnight Code-O-Graph against the mortal insult of rust. The dishes were abandoned in the shallow kitchen sink, a surprise for Fitzgore, payment for his wise-guy remarks. Pewter, china, stainless steel, glass, silver, and greasy lettuce.

Kristin puffed with languid abandon on an after-dinner cigarette. Gnossos lay on his back, boy scout shirt open at the throat, watching shadows flutter on the ceiling. Hybrid animals leaping among shadow and flame.
How can those terrified vague fingers
, came the thought, just an instant before he found them in his palm.

Again, she was actually holding his hand.

Marriage, whispered the specter of some unwanted self. And right behind it, almost as if this self were implicit in the decapitated face above the fireplace: Beware the monkey-demon. Instead he measured her body with the fleshy calipers of his mind’s vicarious eye, matched it against the feral silhouettes of his Radcliffe muse, of Southside five years earlier in the basement full of inner tubes under the Black Elks, of the girl with a forgotten name on the coast, who wore white silk stockings and red high heels. Faceless figures in the back seats of cars, on tabletops, rugs, afghan-covered beds, couches (with parents dozing in adjacent rooms), windy seashores on the sand, once up against a field-stone wall in Kansas City; bathtubs, showers, lakesides, riverbanks, bushes, woods, grass, gravel, cobblestone, a garage, a summerhouse, a rocking chair; all the forearms, thighs, breasts, vaginas, kneecaps, tongues, fingers, skin, hair, and loins he had ever numbered or known. But always pulling for the big alternative, an intersection of the arcs, coordinates plotted by some cosmic hand, a circle enclosing the tip of his parabola in the ozone-tinted quadrant of Fulfillment.
He measured, and nothing seemed wanting. For the nth + 1 time the keeper of the wanton flame tried the mortal suggestion: Now or never.

One sock had yet to be removed. It lay collapsed around an ankle. He placed his hand over the green wool, hesitated gently, then went underneath to the vulnerable sole of her foot. She smiled with the sensation, not trying in the slightest to avoid his eyes, offering a subtly reinforcing sound of careless pleasure. At the same time, by way of magnificent surprise, of sudden, stimulating bonus, she brought her knee to her chest. The periscope rose with as much purpose as a surface-shattering Polaris missile.

But her expression changed when his hands slid under her buttocks. He pulled her closer against him, pretending not to see the sudden anxiety, and slipped his fingertips beneath the elastic, scuttling toward the front. Nice, springy around the navel, no fat, all firm. C’mon, baby, keep it going, no left turns.

“Gnossos.”

“Right here, Piglet.” Stopping not allowed.

But she went stiff just the same. Her smile faded and her eyes closed. “Could you wait a moment?”

Coax her, man, no slowing down, remember past failures. Go.

She jerked away just as he would have found it; the searching finger detoured uselessly, trapped under the elastic. “Really, Gnossos, wait.”

Her period, of course. What the hell, do it anyway, no risk. Red corpuscles good for the ’scope, make it grow.

“It’s just,” she began, “oh, it’s never easy to say.”

Be kind. “I understand, man, happens all the time, every month in fact—”

“No you don’t, either. It’s just—Gnossos, wait, could you move your finger a minute? It’s only—oh damn.”

Kiss her, make it easier, little neckrub, supply confidence, be a husband. She twisted away, her eyes seeking the fire for distraction, then heaved an uncomfortable sigh, blurting out the news, “It’s not my period, it’s just that I’m a virgin.”

And I’m Popeye the Sailor Man. Back down—

“No, Pooh Bear, really. It would be horrible with your fingernail or something.” She was still watching the fire. “Please.”

“Check,” he said, brushing her eyebrows. The short hairs were bristly and electric, people never dig eyebrows enough. Try the thighs.

“Gnossos!” She wheeled around. “Oh all right, but you’ll know soon enough.” Could she mean it? Too good to be true.

“You’re putting me on?”

“If you mean I’m trying to fool you, no.”

“No, man?”

“There’s no reason, don’t be silly.”

“Virgin, baby?”

“Piglet genus.”

“Membrane, and like that?”

“I guess.”

“O wow.”

“You can’t tell me you didn’t half expect it?”

Gnossos rolled over on his side and bumped against her rib cage. He gave a short, meaningful giggle. She waited a moment before coming after him.

“Don’t make fun, Gnossos.”

He waved his hand to tell her it was anything but, yet he couldn’t stop the recurrence of the giggle. His forehead finally came to rest on the rug. His brain reeled from the potential significance of the fact, the extraordinary coincidence. “Me too,” he said, “me too, man,” and threw one arm around her waist, as if it belonged.

“You
are
making fun!”

“No no, really, not at all. Come on, Piglet, you must have known.”

“Known what? You’re all so cryptic, Pooh, and this is getting embarrassing.”

“Intact, unviolated. Virgin, baby. Me.”

She gave him back his arm and made a face. “Oh, Gnossos, come on.”

“It’s true, man, dig it, it’s a real fact.”

“I’ll bet it is.”

“Honest to Jesus.”

“They even talk about you in Chevy Chase.”

“No they don’t, man, what is it?”

“It’s where I live, near Washington.”

“Never been there, must’ve been someone else.”

“What about that Radcliffe junior who carries used things around in a musette bag? And the coed who went into a nunnery last year.”

“What kind of things?”

“You know, those rubber things. She carries them in a bag like your rucksack. They talk about it all over the ivy league.”

Jesus, saving up her Gnossos seed. “Don’t believe it, all innuendo, cats need something to jaw about, spice up their day.”

“Gnossos, really. And in the first place, it doesn’t matter that much.”

“Come on, man, you know it does. I laid them was all. What’s that got to do with being a virgin?” He tried taking her hand. “Seriously.”

“Oh, now you look intense. I said it didn’t matter. Please, I couldn’t bear to have you somber.”

“But I’m telling you true, man. Membranes are spiritual. I mean, in the last analysis. Even vestals made it with priests when they weren’t diddling around.”

She moaned. “I don’t
care
what vestals did, and men aren’t virgins, anyway. You can’t just throw the word around like that.”

“Vestals kept the
flame
, you’ve got to care a little. And in
this
country, baby, men are virgins.”

“Gnossos, you practically admitted you slept with all those girls—”

“Laid,” he said, pointing with a finger. “It’s not the same. You never masturbated on a seesaw? No, wait, don’t look away.”

“That’s plain not nice.”

“Flagpoles, man, monkey-bars? C’mon, everybody masturbates.”

“Do they? Oh even if they do, it’s different.”

“I’m hip it’s different, that’s where it’s all at. It’s balling, not love-making, right? Man, you can hop-off on another individual just as easily as you can on a motorcycle, say.”

“Well, maybe I’m just thinking of it physically, then. After all, if you’re inside them—”

“Hey, I could be inside the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner. It’s only what you surrender, a question of choice. If you’re passive, what the hell happens? Nothing, right?”

“Listen, if this turns into a word game I’m going to lose out. Anyone can talk circles around me, even my father.”

“Surrender is the critical factor, dig? The will imparts permission. And if you don’t mind, leave your father out of this.”

“But what is there to surrender?”

Gnossos poked the embers with an engraved andiron and thought for a moment. A charred log collapsed into a puff of new flame. The room was comfortably warm, on the verge of becoming hot. “Your head, for one.”

She shook her hair free of her eyes, then nodded slightly. “Then you’ve never, I’d suppose you’d say—given yourself? I mean, the way you’re describing it?”

“Check.”

“And you expect me to understand why, just like that?”

Gnossos shrugged and took her other hand. “You know already, man. The conventional reason. Lose it and it’s gone.”

She watched the irony change his expression, then smiled a little more. “But girls have their own reasons. They worry about liking it too much, not being able to stop.”

“Get the clap, never marry, ruin and scandal in Chevy Chase.”

“Well yes, since you mention it.”

“So?”

“Oh hell,” she said, getting up. “Will you wait a moment, then. While I go to the bathroom?”

He grinned, and watched the fluttering air over the ash as she tiptoed across the room. He picked up her discarded knee-sock, rolled it into a ball, smiled, tumbled over on his back, drained both glasses of Cointreau, and filled again. Some Ouzo next time.

Then he noticed the record propped next to the pillow on his bed. It was tied with a green ribbon and had a note attached. It must have been there all evening. He crawled over curious and read the message:

Well, how do you like that? Groovy old chic actually came bearing gifts. He looked, and it was a morning and evening raga by Ravi Shankar. The needle was dropping into place when she came back into the room.

“You found it,” she said.

“Hey, man,” looking for words, slightly embarrassed, “you buy gifts.”

“Now and again,” she said, strolling over. While she was still standing, he came up on his knees and reached under the suede skirt. It was open to the thigh like a wonchai dress. He meant to take down whatever was beneath, but amazingly nothing was there.

Behind her back she held the beige nylon panties she had removed in the bathroom. Gnossos looked up just in time to see them leave her hand, ripple through the air, and land lightly on the smoldering coals. After a moment they blossomed into flame.

“That seems to be that,” she said.

Still on his knees, he parted the heavy material of the skirt and looked. Kristin’s hands took him behind the ears. The hairs glistened umber from the flame. Her legs moved apart and her knees bent slightly as his fingers closed on the backs of her legs. One knee-sock was still collapsed around an ankle.

“Very excellent tasting in music.”

They both jerked around.

George Rajamuttu was standing in the open door, toasting the phonograph with a glass of gin and grenadine.

“Superb improvisation,” said Irma, materializing at his side. Under her arm were a number of 78 records. She was dressed in gauze.

“You will of course enjoy,” said George Rajamuttu, moving clumsily into the room, setting down his drink on the plywood table, “these other recordings from our country.”

“Ali Akbar Khan,” said Irma.

“Pandit Chatur Lal,” said George.

Kristin’s knees had straightened and locked. Her skirt fell closed. She reached down self-consciously and pulled up the sock.

“The continual repetition of seven beats,” said George;

“Corresponding to the Western measure,” said Irma;

“As marked by the time of the tabla,” said George;

“A kind of drum which can be played through an unusual number of octaves,” explained Irma;

“Is worth your respectably particular attention.”

They removed the Ravi Shankar, replaced it with an Ali Akbar Khan, clinked the icecubes in their glasses to punctuate the change, and went to the Navajo rug, where they squatted in the full lotus just inches away from the immobile couple.

“Cheers,” said George and Irma Rajamuttu together, smiling their red-toothed smiles, lifting their glasses.

Under the blinking warning light of Circe III, Gnossos gave the finger to the sign-in girl.

“Pooh Bear!”

“I don’t give a shit.”