ANIMALS
Her skin was made of animals, exceedingly tiny, compressed like a billion paps in a breathing sponge. Caressing her, my palm was caressed by the smooth resilient motion in her skin. Awake or asleep, angry, bored, loving, made no difference. Her skin was superior to attitudes or words. It implied the most beautiful girl. And the core of my pleasure ached for her, the one she implied.
GOD
My mother said, “What’s new?” I said, “Nothing.” She said, “What? You can tell me. Tell me what’s new.” I said, “Something happened.” She said, “I had a feeling. I could tell. What happened?” I said, “Nothing happened.” She said, “Thank God.”
HIS CERTAIN WAY
Ikstein had a certain way of picking up a spoon, asking for the time, getting down the street from here to there. He would pick up his spoon in his certain way, stick it in the soup, lift it to his mouth, stop, then whisper, “Eat, eat, little Ikily.” Everything he did was in his certain way. He made an impression of making an impression. I remembered it. I remembered Ikstein. It was no different to remember than to see the living Ikstein, in his certain little ways. For me, he never died. He lived where he always lived, in my impression of Ikstein. I could bring him back any time, essentially, for me. “Eat, eat, little Ikily.” When he did his work — he was a book and movie reviewer — he always made himself a “nice” bowl of soup. It sat beside his typewriter. He typed a sentence, stopped, said, “Now I’ll have a tasty sip of soup.” Essentially, for me, Ikstein had no other life. If he had in fact another life, it was never available for me. I could not pretend to regret it was no longer available for him. “Oh, poor Ikstein” would mean “Oh, poor me, what I have lost. The sights and sound of Ikstein.” I lost nothing. His loss, I couldn’t appreciate. Neither could he. So I remembered Ikstein and felt no sorrow. I mentioned somebody who had married for the second time. “His second wife looks like the first,” I said. “As if he were pursuing something.” In his certain way, Ikstein said, “Or as if it were pursuing him.” Thus, even his mind lived. I said, “My intention was modest, a bit of chitchat, a germ of sense. I wasn’t hoping, when I have a headache and feel sick and unable to think, to illuminate the depths. Must you be such a prick, Ikstein?”
MOURNFUL GIRLS
Busy naked heels, a rush of silky things, elastic snaps, clicks, a rattle of beads, hangers clinking, humming, her quick consistent breathing as the mattress dipped. Lips touched mine. Paper cracked flat near my head. Wooden heel shafts knocked in the hallway. I opened my eyes. A ten-dollar bill lay on the pillow. I got up, dressed, stuck the bill in my pocket, went to the apartment below, and asked, “Do you want anything?” She said no. She lay on the bed. On the way back I picked up her mail. “Some letters,” I said, and dropped them beside her. She lay on the bed, skirt twisted about her hips and belly, blouse open, bra unhooked to ease the spill. Her blanket was smooth. I whispered, “Mona, Melanie, Mildred, Sarah, Nora, Dora, Sadie.” She whispered, “Mournful girls.” I lost the beginning of the next sentence before I heard the end. She heard as much, glanced at me, quit talking. We undressed. I tugged her off the bed to the mirror. I looked at her. She looked at me. Our arms slipped around them. All had sexual intercourse. I was upstairs when she returned from work. She asked, “Why didn’t you go to the grocery?” I said, “It will take five minutes,” and dashed out. The street was dark, figures appeared and jerked by. In the grocery I couldn’t find the ten-dollar bill. It wasn’t in my pockets. It wasn’t on the floor. I ran back along the street, neck bent like a dog’s, inspecting the flux of cigarette butts, candy wrappers, spittle plops, dog piss, beer cans, broken glass, granular pavement — then remembered — and ran upstairs quietly. She lay on the bed. The milk and meat were warm, butter loose and greasy. Everything except the cream cheese was in the bag beside her bed. She lay on the bed, gnawing cream cheese through the foil. “You should have put the bag in the refrigerator,” I said. She gnawed. “It would have been simple to put the bag in the refrigerator,” I said. “Shut your hole,” she said. I shoved her hand. Cream cheese smeared her nostrils. She lay in the bed, slack, still, breathing through her mouth, as if she wouldn’t cry and was not crying. I took the bag of groceries and went upstairs. The table was set. She was sweeping the kitchen floor, crying.
THE HAND
I smacked my little boy. My anger was powerful. Like justice. Then I discovered no feeling in the hand. I said, “Listen, I want to explain the complexities to you.” I spoke with seriousness and care, particularly of fathers. He asked, when I finished, if I wanted him to forgive me. I said yes. He said no. Like trumps.
ALL RIGHT
“I don’t mind variations,” she said, “but this feels wrong.” I said,“It feels all right to me.” She said, “To you, wrong is right.” I said, “I didn’t say right, I said all right.” “Big difference,” she said. I said, “Yes, I’m critical. My mind never stops. To me almost everything is always wrong. My standard is pleasure. To me, this is all right.” She said, “To me it stinks.” I said, “What do you like?” She said, “Like I don’t like. I’m not interested in being superior to my sensations. I won’t live long enough for all right.”
MA
I said, “Ma, do you know what happened?” She said, “Oh my God.”
NAKED
Ugly or plain she would have had fewer difficulties cultivating an attractive personality or restricting sex to cortex, but she was so nearly physically perfect as to appear, more than anything, not perfect. Not ugly, not plain, then strikingly not perfect made her also not handsome and not at all sentimentally appealing. In brief, what she was she wasn’t, a quality salient in adumbration, unpossessed. She lived a bad metaphor, like the Devil, unable to assimilate paradox to personal life, being no artist and not a religious, suffering spasms of self-loathing in the lonely, moral night. Finally, she smacked a Coke bottle on the rim of the bathtub, mutilated her wrist, then phoned the cops. So clumsy, yet her dinner parties were splendid, prepared at unbelievable speed. She hated to cook. Chewing gum, cigarettes, candy, drugs, alcohol, and taxicabs took her from Monday to Friday. The ambulance attendant — big ironical black man in baggy white trousers — flipped open the medicine cabinet and yelled, “See those barbiturates. You didn’t have to make a mess.” He dragged her out of the tub by the hair, naked, bleeding. She considered all that impressive, but if I responded to her with a look or tone, she detected my feelings before I did and made them manifest, like a trout slapped out of water by a bear. “You admire my eyes? How about my ass?” I thrilled to her acuity. But exactly then she’d become a stupid girl loosening into sexual mood, and then, then, if I touched her she offered total sprawl, whimpering, “Call me dirty names.” I tried to think of her as a homosexual person, not a faggot. She begged me to wear her underpants and walk on my knees. When I demurred, she pissed on the sheets. “You don’t love me,” she said. “What a waste getting involved with you.” Always playing with her flashy, raglike scar, sliding it along the tendons like a watchband.
BETTER
I phoned and said, “I feel good, even wonderful. Everything is great. It’s been this way for months and it’s getting better. Better, better, better. How are you, Ma?” She said, “Me?” I said, “Yes, how are you?” “Me?” she said. “Don’t make me laugh.”