Authors: Benjamin Kunkel
“Oh you don’t even think it, you just
know.
”
“Bof—okay. Well I
know
or I
believe
that for the mother countries, it was therefore possible to let
go
of New England, let
go
of North America. Because you were redundant, you can see?” And now in the super-dark cabana Brigid pitched or spun the argument that America had been able to win real as well as notional independence from the old European metropolis, and ultimately escape the neocolonial predicament of things down here, because its early industries were identical rather than complementary to Europe’s. So New England had established its own manufactories and created and relied on local markets and thus eventually built up some real economic independence consisting of powerful producers and strong consumers, a project that had also been attempted in Ecuador and elsewhere after the Second World War, and abandoned since the debt crisis of the eighties. “It’s depressing for South America to be still the same as always—raw materials, cheap labor.”
“That is depressing,” I said, feeling somewhat glum myself, like the Abulinix might not work after all. And yet I found it was really
doing
something to me to imagine the original American Wilmerdings happening onto the meagerness of New England nature as in fact a piece of luck. To think of anything is just a step away from imagining it otherwise, and now that I thought of my particular American family, and the portion of lucky accident that seemed to have fallen onto our lives to get mistaken for grace, I became a little unreal to myself. Their luck had become my luck, and what did I do with my luck? It seemed like I just sat in it, waiting for more.
“Brigid?” I said.
“Yes? What?” The pouting semi-impudent way she said this, like some bored girl unhappy at being indoors, reminded me suddenly of Alice. I’d been about to congratulate or else console Brigid for all the things she knew, but now I found I was thinking about Alice, so similarly lucky to me, yet more favored by nature in the brains department. Alice must have been thinking along essentially Brigid-esque lines for years, but it wasn’t clear whether this had done her much good. Her sad or grim politics got more and more sophisticated with every rung of education, until finally they landed her a sweet job complete with health insurance—but they also seemed to have exacted a serious revenge against her, according to which she considered all the good things about her, from the straight teeth and stocked brains all the way down to the long legs in the fancy knee-high boots, to be just some side effects of
class
or whatever. And this seemed not unrelated to her reluctance to go to nice restaurants, or ever have a boyfriend, or even a girlfriend. Or really even to be very happy at all.
“You know, Brigid,” I found myself saying, “you’re a kind of impersonal person, you know that? You’re like a brain on wheels. Which I’m not saying is
bad
—but I wonder if it ever gets in the way of some of the more personal relationships you might like to have.”
I could hear the vicious smile in her voice: “Maybe I am simply not like the personal people which you are so happy to know in New York that when you are lonely and at a loose end you come here to Natasha—about whom you know
nothing.
Instead you find me. I am sorry.”
“Hey . . .” I dangled one arm outside my netting, in case a physical rapprochement might be made and some more hand-holding be enjoyed.
“I am sorry if you don’t enjoy me as much as your tree. But who are you, that you find a strange tree in the Amazon and you act as if this is your invention? You behave as if you are Adam and it was planted there especially for you.”
“You’re talking Adam from the Bible.”
“Evidently not the tree of knowledge that you have smeared yourself with.”
“Um, hello? The tree of knowledge is the one you’re supposed to avoid? If you read past the first five pages—”
“I don’t want to discuss theology with you. I could show you what it has done to Ecuador and even to Edwin to rely on this economy of raw materials.”
“You can show me whatever you want. But I’m not going to be an ideologue, all right?”
“So it is bizarre for you that I believe in something? What do you believe in then, besides a hairless future for the Western world?”
“I believe in things, Brigid. I believe in my
self.
”
“And your self that you believe in, what does
it
believe in?”
Around this time I seemed to feel something tickle my dangling hand—a brush of coarse fur seemed to slip across my fingertips. I hoped to God it wasn’t a spider and yanked my hand back under the net. “How about love?” I hurriedly said, tucking the net under my sleep sack and sealing myself off. “Love I believe in. But then I admit that love is like family, which I acknowledge it can lead to, and which likewise seems to be a fairly painful institution. Hmm . . . Well, let’s see . . . Other convictions and beliefs. Sex—enjoyable. TV—diverting. Sleep—refreshing. Free trade—on balance a good thing. You see how I could go on. And life in general, Brigid, I would have to say is maybe a very mixed blessing—but I do believe the blessing part is there.” I thought a little. “So I’m very anti-death, as a conviction. Therefore anti-spider.”
I’d never touched a tarantula before. But that was really what it felt like I had touched.
“I don’t like death either. In Ecuador the first cause of death is children’s diarrhea.”
“Well obviously I’m against
that.
And don’t think I don’t have any political convictions. I’m a Democrat, definitely. I’d vote for any of them.”
“Oh good night to you. We’ll discuss your creeds in the morning.”
It was true that the Democrats seemed like a pretty lame finale.
I lay there listening to the Oriente. It hissed and hissed like some big leak in the humungous withering beach ball of the damaged earth. The spider or spiders had really changed the tone of this toneless sound. “I don’t know about this jungle, Bridge. I mean didn’t humanity, in order to be human—didn’t we decide to get out of a place like this? You know, head down to the nice soft savannah instead? Maybe deforestation isn’t so bad if we get rid of all the places like this. I’m sorry, but so what if the world gets a little hotter. You could turn the whole disoriente into a golf course. What do you think?”
“What do
you
think? You don’t think any of this. Bonne nuit,” she said unpleasantly. “Fais de doux rêves.”
“You don’t believe in anything either,” I pointed out. “Anthropology? Indigenous absolutism? Belgium? What are you doing next?”
And now I just lay there with my eyes shut in order not to glimpse a roaming or stalled patch of pure blackness suspended on the netting a few inches from my face. I couldn’t decide whether to apologize to Brigid or what. My arachnophobia had rarely seemed so severe, or my abulia either.
Maybe ten minutes had passed when I noticed these weird little rhythmical sighs she was making, complete with heavy breathing. Until then I’d figured she was asleep. I couldn’t believe it! I listened to the suspicious stifled sounds, then heard a telltale whimper. Apparently she was one of those perverted girls who get turned on by having a fight! At this juncture our mutual loneliness seemed basically consummated and, filled with indignation, I resorted to my own genitalia and started doing what I could. Alas my dick felt difficult to convince of any abstract lust, and nothing was working until I hit upon an image of naked dark Brigid walking ahead of me up some spiral staircase. This pleasant picture was curiously succeeded by the memory of Vaneetha undoing her white Oxford shirt beneath the mirror-faceted party globe spinning slowly on a cord dropped from the Chambers St. ceiling, and now Natasha climbed on the merry-go-round of pornographic imagery and rode by naked as could be, smiling her Joker’s smile. But here was Brigid again, turning around at the top of the stairs—
“What—may I ask you what are you doing there?” Real-life Brigid had interrupted my fantasy, in which tiny propellers were spinning on her two pasties.
At length my dick had obeyed and now I was—“I’m jerking off,” I said.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m masturbating—I’m manually stimulating my penis in pursuit of orgasm?” I stalled out in my exertions. “What are
you
doing?”
“I was crying a little—if you want to know it.” You could hear in her ragged voice it was true.
“Oh . . .” Feeling extremely uncouth, I put my penis away. I might have thrown it away if I could.
“I had so looked forward to you, Dwight. I had such an
idea
of you.”
I didn’t say anything. Then I said, “Well I had some ideas too. About Natasha. But Natasha doesn’t know me, and I don’t know her. So I’m sorry about any ideas she gave you but—”
“But what has happened to you today?”
“Nothing,”
I said. Yet while this statement was strictly and even somewhat harrowingly accurate—all at once in a surge of shame I gave up on Brigid, the bobohuariza, and Abulinix—it was also true that the nonoccurrence felt like one of my bigger life-events to date.
“Nor to me,” Brigid said with some sort of a sad/angry snort and sniffle combination. “True, you are nothing. Return to your pleasure, go ahead. I hope you are imagining the sight of many hairless people in orgy together?”
EIGHTEEN
Eventually Brigid fell asleep for real. Somehow even pitch black goes dimmer with the subtraction of one consciousness, and you can tell.
I had no intention of touching my penis then or ever again. Yet among the pornographic images I’d entertained, one of them was planted in an actual historical sequence of real and undeniable events, and now with my hands at my side I helplessly watched a certain episode from my past play through my mind like some small-hours rerun on TV.
Vaneetha was standing near the doorway, saying that while Ford’s birthday party hadn’t made for much of a date, at least it had helped to make up for the
dreadful
one endured the weekend before with a young man of the same caste whom her parents regarded as a decent marriage prospect. “I’ll have to bow to them eventually. But I think I may have several years of holding out. And your parents? Do they also want you to find someone from the, er—”
“No articulated policy. Actually I think mom is very pro-miscegenation. Because she’s like look at the WASPs. Alcoholism, listlessness.”
“You might end up with anyone.”
“Except you.” Involuntarily I sighed with relief and she laughed.
Yet it
was
a relief that, as well as things were going—with several vodka gimlets behind me, the fantastic sensation of improved mental health which I’d derived from beginning psychoanalysis that morning with Alice, and now this lovely woman before me—marriage was already ruled out, and I could proceed more or less anxiety-free.
“This nice Indian boy,” Vaneetha was saying, “didn’t even have a favorite French film when I asked.” Her enunciation remained impressively elocutionary despite a slight drink blur at the edges. “I’m curious—what would you say is your favorite French film?”
“My F.F.F.? Hmm . . .” I told her that at some point I had seen a movie in which all these beaming brightly-attired people, singing French words, had danced around with twirling Technicolor umbrellas. Then I remembered the title:
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg.
I couldn’t tell if her expression commented on my pronunciation or my choice, nor were the possibilities logically incompatible. “Well it just seemed to be this colorful utopia of cheerful nonsense,” I said. “So I loved it. I know I might suffer a lot in later life. So in the meantime I try to avoid art having to do with suffering. Or the human condition.”
This caused her to choke on her wine, then snort. “I’ll see you soon then?” she said brightly.
“Cool.” I bent forward to drop a kiss on her cheek, as is widely done in New York—but she shrank away and was like, “I
con’t
kiss you.”
“Don’t worry, was only going to be a cheek thing. I wasn’t going in for the kill.”
“I should have told you. I have something of a boyfriend. In Boston.”
“Right on,” I said, and then
she
grabbed
me
and started Frenching. Naturally I Frenched back in kind. Politeness would have demanded it even if desire hadn’t caught up and clamored as well.
Before long Dan had appeared beside us asking whether we wanted to participate in the big roll. I translated: “He means do we want to do Ecstasy with—what—with five or six other people? It
is
Ford’s birthday,” I added by way of peer pressure. And after some mumbled unfollowable deliberations Vaneetha surprised me by saying, “All right! I never do anything spontaneous. I have all my sick days still.”
In the living room Sanch and Ford and Ford’s girlfriend Kat were sliding the couches together in order to facilitate what Kat was forecasting would become one big cuddle-puddle. Meanwhile Dan climbed unsteadily on top of our card table to take down the homeroom-style clock nailed to the wall. “Don’t need to know the time.”
“Do you know about Baudelaire?” Vaneetha asked. “He’s said to have torn the hands from a clock and scrawled across its face
It’s always later than you think.
”
“Hope this girl isn’t too smart for you, Dwight,” Ford said. And then with an incredible aura of inevitability he went off to fetch his old St. Jerome’s–era lava lamp.
A spatter of light flakes shed by the party globe was carouseling up and down across the walls as we all six sat down and arranged ourselves in a row on the melded pair of couches. Vaneetha and I sat facing each other in the middle. The music consisted at this point of a propellery sound spinning underneath warm electronic washes of tone. “Who are these guys?” I asked anyone. “Because I’m getting into this.”
“Sounds like warm milk,” Sanch said.
“That a band?”
“No I mean it actually aurally sounds like the audio equivalent of milk from a mammal that temperature-wise is warm.” The astutely synesthetic observation elicited a murmur of consensus from the room. And pretty soon Ford said, “Is anyone feeling the . . . ?” He looked around for confirmation.