H
ALLOWEEN
, I
KNEW, WOULD NOT BE AN EASY HOLIDAY FOR
me. Molly and I had always treated Halloween like Valentine’s Day, leaving a bowl of candy on the step while we slipped away
for a quiet dinner out, to commemorate our meeting on the steps between Heaven and Hell. That, of course, was not an option
this year. I hunkered down in the house, lights off and shades down to evoke the dwelling of a misanthropic recluse. But neither
these measures, nor the night’s unseasonal humidity, prevented a parade of sweaty zombies, miserable robots, and gasping princesses
from climbing the steps to collect stale jellybeans that I poured for them out of a misted bag. Mostly the black ones, which
Molly had never liked.
I was sweating inside my mask. An impulse buy, charged to Boggs’s credit card along with his condoms, it had cost $3.99. It
had a half-stitched head wound and a long black mane that I stroked back with my clammy hand. I’d slit open the mouth so I
could smoke and drink through the mask, and the two narrow eyeholes permitted a blinkered vantage on an old VHS tape of
Molly in Bartók’s
Bluebeard’s Castle
. She was standing under a doorway beside a crazed baritone in a flouncy robe.
Whether it was the eyeholes or the decayed quality of the VHS that made the spectacle appear as if it had been filmed from
a gauzy distance, I can’t say. Kyle had gone to an overnight lock-in at the church, which would insulate him from the pagan
holiday and my dour company. It seemed that I had survived the worst of the night. Word had gotten out about the stale jellybeans
and traffic was slowing, leaving me to my solitary masque. When the doorbell rang around 10:30, I was prepared to empty the
rest of my supply into the bags of the stragglers.
I
F
I
DIDN
’
T
recognize her at first, that was the fault of the peephole. It compressed figures into squat lumps. All night it had been
doing the same thing to the kids. I saw a flattened beehive wig, a miniature lady pressed into evening wear, who appeared
to be drowning in a puddle of hair.
It wasn’t until she came inside that I saw Plea’s swollen eyes, the frosting in her wig. She was wearing an elaborate white
dress with an undercarriage, but it was deeply besmirched with chocolate frosting and cake crumbs. The more intact slabs of
frosting showed fragments of an inscription. Her gray coiffure slumped to the side, revealing some of her actual hair, and
a bloodied piercing in her left earlobe. The white fabric of her dress was sweat-soaked, showing through to what prudes of
the past would quite rightly have called her unmentionables. The red guillotine line on her neck had blurred and smeared.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
“Plea … what happened to you?” I brought a roll of paper
towels and started wiping the thick gummy cake from her shoulders and the back of her neck, coming away with heavy handfuls
of it.
“They came out of nowhere. History repeating itself, I guess.” She laughed, but this brought more tears and a gush of snot.
“This is getting gross,” she said. “And I was so stupid. I sold those cakes to them.”
“Shh, shh.”
She was tugging at her undercarriage and I helped lift her skirt. Imprecise with wine, I touched her body accidentally in
a number of places. I wasn’t disgusted by this contact, far from it. The warmth of her neck and back had passed into my hands.
I retreated and set the undercarriage at the side of the entranceway: it quivered there, a fragile and useless architecture.
“Listen,” I said. “Why don’t you go down to Kyle’s room, take a shower if you want. I’ll get you something to change into.”
I stopped, recognizing what this would entail. “And then I’ll take you home,” I added quickly.
She shook her head. “I can’t go home. Nobody’s there.”
“Your parents …”
“Are at an all-night recreation of the masked ball from Schnitzler’s
Traumnovelle
. Don’t ask. I just don’t want to be alone right now.”
I considered the queen consort in her deflated dress. “You can’t call?”
“No phones.” She smiled ruefully. “It’s a strict period thing.”
I didn’t say anything. Maybe I couldn’t verbally assent to this situation, although it was already in motion, was already
happening as I made to leave the room.
“Nice mask, by the way,” Plea said.
Rain began to fall like a steady, incongruous round of applause. I climbed the stairs, passing my wife’s faintly lit, painted
image, her crowds of gray suitors. I tried to recall the name of the movie Molly told me the paintings reminded her of. Certainly
she’d told me. It must have been one of those conversations during which I was only kind of half-listening to my wife, an
attitude that shocked me now that it became less likely with each passing moment that I would ever hear her voice again. At
the landing I stopped for breath, leaning my hand on the banister like an old man. I missed so much, I thought. Now I’m just
a masturbating ghost. I glanced down at the TV where a tenor was stilled mid-aria, throat open, hand raised, squiggly pause
line bisecting his belly.
I opened Molly’s bedroom closet and inhaled its crypt-like odors. The gowns hung in a row, their rhinestones gleaming, an
archive of gorgeous skins that had been shed. I parted the watery silk. None of this would do. What I wanted was her gray
nightshirt with the white collar. That durable, unflattering garment was something I wanted to see worn again. I shoved and
elbowed the gowns as I dug for the nightshirt, but it did not turn up on the hangers, in the hamper, or in the wardrobe. Which
was odd, because Molly couldn’t sleep without it. It will turn up, I thought, as I went downstairs with Molly’s workout clothes,
a pair of loose sweatpants and a T-shirt for a defunct punk band called
THE ROTTING KISSES
. I hoped they would fit. When I reached the living room I paused a moment to consult the tenor whose raised hand seemed to
suggest that I stop right there, instead of descending to the basement. I dismissed him with a quick flick of the remote and
went downstairs.
Kyle’s room now resembled a spare subterranean cell. Most of his belongings were packed into a row of white garbage bags in
the garage. Little remained: a few pens and notebook pages on his neat desk. The posters of hair rockers and cinema robots
had come down, leaving a dim, tacky residue on the walls. The sole remaining image, more prominent for all the blankness that
framed it, was a sleek and shirtless young man with long blond hair posed against an archery target. His arms were spread
against the black and white rings, coolly daring the viewer to pierce his body with arrows or nails. Large crimson letters
spelled out the name
SEBASTIAN
. A few feet under this poster, Plea was swaddled to the neck in Kyle’s comforter. She flinched as I entered the room.
“Listen,” she said. “We have a situation. We have a corset situation.”
“Okay.” I backed up the stairs.
“Which is that I may need help getting out of this thing. And I do need to get out of it. It’s causing me intense pain. But
the thought of being seen in it is also pretty painful.”
“I doubt it looks
that
…”
“I don’t know if you know how a corset works? Here’s my honest assessment. I look like a girl with pretty nice boobs and a
flat stomach, but there’s like this loaf of unbaked bread dough around my midriff.”
“Okay.”
“I’m just verbally preparing you for what you’re about to see.”
“The corset needs to come off.”
“It needs to come off, but there’s something you could do that would reduce the um … mortification, for me.”
“What’s that?”
“If you took your clothes off as well, it would make things easier.”
Staircases and landings are areas where I make poor decisions, I thought to myself on the stairs, as I removed my socks. Plea’s
idea was fair, but it was a bad idea in all other respects. I lifted my shirt, unbuckled my pants, and dropped the garments
along the edges of the stairs, as if making way for an expected guest. If I’d been soberer I wouldn’t have so quickly unsheathed
a body that had been ravaged in recent months. My skin was pasty and pale, the coils of body hair shining with sweat. Plea
would see it all, and no amount of quasi-paternal bluffing could conceal how I really felt about her.
She laughed when I returned to Kyle’s room.
“That includes the mask, Norberg.”
As I approached the bed, half-erect, I discarded the monster mask. I knew my hair would look bad after a night beneath it.
She would see the bare patches of my scalp under the thinning strands. But she smiled at me. She moved the coverlet to the
side, and there was nothing between me and her very wide eyes, which were full of apprehension. I also saw her breasts slumped
on the ivory corset, her stomach, her blue panties and lightly stubbled legs. I was not ready for this new body. But the dissenting
voice in my head faded as I approached.
We spoke in whispers. I told her that I was almost forty years old. It had been a while since I’d been close to anyone, and
I was worried that I would disappoint her. Maybe this was a mistake. She pressed her finger to my lips. If I pretended she
was beautiful for tonight, she said, she would forget about all that. This would be our secret. No one had to know.
I knelt over her and performed the ministrations of a lady-in-waiting,
dextrous movements that required a concentrated gaze. She laughed as I undid the twined corset ribbons, loosened them from
the eyelets. Her body relaxed and her organs returned to their natural alignment. With trembling hands I slid her panties
down her thighs and over her ankles. In a spirit of solemnity I lowered my head and asked if she wanted me to stop.
She pressed my head between her legs and giggled as my tongue moved.
She grabbed my puzzled meat and asked if she grossed me out.
Our bodies lurched together. I licked the sweat from her shoulder, tasting sugar from the cake. She held my ass, guiding me
deeper into a warm grip that felt too good. Her flesh rippled beneath me in pale waves. It was a factually beautiful sight
but too intense. My eyes flickered to the periphery of this strange, bare room: Kyle’s pens rattling in their mesh container,
the eyes of the teen idol watching impassively from the wall. We were conspirators in the darkening room and I felt certain
that someone had seen us, that this desperate act would soon be reported back to the actual world.
Halloween had ended. Our costumes lay in a jumbled pile. The rough stubble of her armpit provided cover for my tears. Residual
shivers ran through my body while I wondered where my mask was. I reached for her small hand and gripped it hard, as if it
was the only thing that kept me from drowning in the soft pool of my son’s pillows and sheets.
I
WOKE NEXT
to a body-shaped imprint in Kyle’s bed. Half-consciously I smoothed the sheets with an erasing hand. Last
night’s encounter had the blurry implausibility of a dream, and I waited to remember the falling plane or slanted building
in which it had taken place. The fact remained, though, that I was in my son’s bed for some reason—as Sebastian confirmed,
smiling deviously from the wall. I turned among the unfamiliar pillows. My fluffy accomplices lay silent and inert, clinging
to stray hairs of hers. Catching Plea’s fragrance, an overpowering jasmine scent that must have come from the mall, I leapt
out of bed, trailing the sheets behind me. Once I’d deposited them in the washer I returned for the undersheet and pillowcases.
As I was disposing of this evidence, the doorbell rang, its call harsh and incongruous. I doused the sheets in detergent,
unsure whether to answer. The second buzz doubled in duration. As the white cotton whirled in the dryer, I staggered into
my crumpled clothes and up the stairs.
McCready and the Oracle bulged on the other side of the keyhole, their chubby faces solemn. The blue uniforms they wore seemed
to signal some kind of demotion. “Good morning, Norberg, hope we didn’t wake you,” McCready said, pushing through the door
the moment I unlocked it.
“No, I was just doing some laundry.”
“It’s not a crime.” McCready winked. “You will remember my partner. Please forgive him—the Oracle has lost his voice.”
“Don’t be melodramatic,” whispered the Oracle, leaning close enough to spit in McCready’s ear. “It’s only laryngitis.”
I offered them coffee, which the Oracle ordered black, McCready with several spoonfuls of cream and sugar. My old-fashioned
percolator shivered and sighed, its orgasmic-sounding exertions amusing to the former detectives, though not at all to
me. We gathered around the coffee table with our steaming mugs and lit cigarettes. McCready and the Oracle took the leather
couch, while I sat in the big armchair. I left the lamp off, dreading its brightness. It was a drab, muted day, the gutters
still discharging last night’s rain.
“We apologize for just dropping in like this,” McCready said. “The reason we came is that the Oracle had a dream last night.”
The Oracle nodded and exhaled a comma of smoke. He reached into his pocket and produced a small journal with pastel constellations
and iridescent moons. He found the most recent entry and handed the book to McCready.
McCready grinned wryly. “Yes, we know, Norberg, what could be duller than someone else’s dream.” He crossed his legs and pulled
a pair of drugstore reading glasses from his shirt pocket. “But surely you will acknowledge that there are gifted people whose
visions should be attended to in every detail. Not only that, but reread and reinterpreted, dwelled upon.”
“It was about your wife,” the Oracle croaked.
“I really think it’s better if you don’t talk,” McCready said. He glanced at me over the rims of the glasses. “Norberg, you
look uncomfortable. You’re sweating and trembling. Is anything wrong?” I shook my head, willing my hands into quiescence.
“It’s not
that
kind of dream about your wife, don’t worry. Though to be sure, many have had that dream.” His gaze returned to the page.
“Okay, here we are. The Oracle is taking your wife to some sort of clinic. Driving M. Norberg to clinic for a procedure, it
says here. But we don’t know what kind of procedure, right? The dream wasn’t that specific?”