Category: Article

Things changed. National Guardsmen roamed the subway terminals now in their fatigues and black berets, brand-new assault rifles cradled in their arms. The homeless were suddenly visible again. Irony had reached the far end of its arc—Johnny Cash was covering Depeche Mode’s homage to Johnny Cash. It was a confusing time for me, after my neighbor went missing.

“Who?” Jenny said.

“The guy in 2B,” I said. “I forget his name. But it’s been days since I’ve seen him.”

At 6:45 every evening, my neighbor and I would converge from opposite ends of the block like somebody walking up to a mirror. Once at the stoop, we’d grimace at each other and say, “Hey, what’s up, thanks, cool, alright.” We’d enjoy the mailbox moment, inspecting our envelopes with the focus of men at adjacent urinals; then, eyes on the floor, saunter in a way that suggested we were not following each other up the stairs. After a round of key jangling, we’d open our doors at opposite ends of the hall and, with a last glance-and-grin before crossing the threshold, shut doors and lock locks.

Static from the outer reaches of the universe came to me through the phone receiver. Finally, Jenny said, “So what are we doing this weekend?”

“I think it was Maximus.”

“Anyway, that whole thing with the ringing turned out to be nothing. Did I tell you?” She knew she had. Telling me a second time was her way of chastising me for forgetting to follow up about it. “I got them irrigated and now my clothes hiss when I move and the sound of my own chewing’s driving me crazy.” Truthfully, I had trouble keeping up with the various ailing tracts in her body.

“Geronimus?” I asked. “Heronimus? Something Roman. You told me so obviously you know.”

“I’m talking to a deaf person here. Can we talk about something real for once? Can we? And not some bullshit fantasy of yours?”

The residue of past arguments made it impossible for us to ever have a pure moment. It was combustible stuff, this residue—and each word a spark—making every conversation an exercise in damage control, in taking and offering the least offense.

I unscrewed the cap on my beer and, holding the phone’s mouthpiece to my forehead, pulled a long, sudsy gulp. “OK,” I gasped. “When are you coming over?”

The real problem was that Jenny was just Jenny to me. Her lips were no longer the kiss-raw genital echo they’d been those inaugural weeks; now they were plain old Jenny lips, cracked and bleeding in winter, greasy while slurping Thai noodles, painted on increasingly rarer occasions. She had become, as of late, so unmoored from me that we found ourselves—on our way back, say, from Sunday brunch somewhere—drifting as far as five or six paces from each other. A stop-and-linger at the local kitsch store window led to half a block of catching up on days I felt like catching up, or—on days that I didn’t—a phone call (after not finding her at my apartment) trying to untangle the misunderstanding around what the plan after brunch was exactly. “I told you I had work to do.” “You don’t just disappear!”

I interpreted the permanent interment of her contacts in their little screw-top coffins and the donning the black horn-rims as an act of hostility. I couldn’t remember the last time she took her hair out of its ponytail, pulled back so tightly that dead-on she looked bald. And it wasn’t like she didn’t own slinky dresses or a decent pair of fuck-me boots. These days on “date night” she bounced along beside me like someone being baby-sat. She came to me on the days she worked in her chinos and bleach-yellowed oxford smelling of fried onions and boiled chicken. All of this I took as personal affronts, so that by the time she opened her mouth to say something at the end of a day, she was already at a disadvantage.

And who had I become—to her, to myself? Lately, with Jenny, I seemed to be someone else entirely. He was a mask, a foil, some part she had driven me to play. I detested this guy.

As I started in on the dishes, I continued our bickering in my head. I squeezed out some dish soap into the stagnant pool. An orange grease-slick dilated like something shocked, revealing a sunken pot with burnt meat sauce stuck to the bottom. I turned on the faucet and let the water froth, then left the dishes to soak. Wandering the confines of my apartment aborting tasks, I imagined myself being filmed—opening a pile of mail, looking for a CD to play, separating the strewn clothes into a Mine pile and a Jenny pile, leaving the two mounds as I went on to start something else—an imaginary camera on me the entire time, my self-esteem bolstered by millions of viewers, fans and critics interpreting my inability to stay focused, my meandering around the house as meaningful meandering, important meandering, a semiotic-generational meandering. I pictured this raw, aimless footage—me staring into the empty fridge, me flipping through the Daily News television insert for twenty minutes before realizing it was three months old—being edited into something funny and tragic and hopeful.

But we were careful with each other that night. I opened the door to Jenny, flushed and pink-cheeked, snow melting into drops on her coat. She found the odd root vegetable or two in my crisper. She cut off the flowering portions and popped open dried and canned stuff I didn’t even know I had. She boiled a pot of water. She chopped and sautéed dinner, the peculiar odor of dust baking off the long-disused broiler preceding the more pleasant one of things being caramelized.

At that moment I was grateful. I felt as though I were being rescued.

The evening, however, went downhill after that. We sat on my futon. I wanted to say something but she preempted it by switching on the tube. We descended into a labyrinth of reality game shows and cop dramas and fell asleep without a word. I woke at three and turned off the television. Jenny, in a stupor, undressed. I did the same. We lay naked next to one another. I slipped into a dream where we were fucking and got up several hours later to find her, and her pile of laundry, gone.

I hesitate to mention what I did for work in an effort to avoid it defining me. I am not what I do, contrary to what’s said about that; or rather, I am not what I do for a living. Who would hold a person to the eight hours spent sleeping as a measure of the kind of man he was? My eight hours at work were just as compulsory, and as inert. It required of me a certain mode of dress, a certain conduct toward others. My interior life there was busied with the usual fantasies: that gust of courage which might allow me to say certain things to my superiors, to coworkers I despised, to subordinates I longed for. I was required to remember things and relay these things to others. I gave input when prompted. Sometimes I delegated. There were lunch breaks, coffee breaks and cigarette breaks (until I quit smoking, at which time I began taking fresh-air breaks). I went to this place five times a week, no more, and took off the occasional nationally appointed three-day weekend. My work schedule made me a good candidate for one of those cards you could swipe through a turnstile every seventeen minutes for a month, but I found myself these days walking back to the apartment rather than completing the circuit on the subway.

Then it was Saturday. I was coming back from an overnight at Jenny’s. A postal handcart with its rubberbanded handle was parked by the front steps. I unlocked the front door and caught the mailman mid-sort: the entire row of mailboxes was tilted forward so as to allow him access to each through the top. We exchanged hellos. He asked my apartment and then offered several envelopes out of his stack.

“You wouldn’t happen to know by any chance,” I asked, “if the guy in 2B did a change of address in the last month or so, would you?”
“No,” he said
, “but if he doesn’t come for it soon I’ll be filling out a fifteen-oh-nine on him. Will you look at it in there?”

I peered into the box and saw a tubed mass of envelopes and catalogues. “I could hold them,” I offered.

“And I could go to jail. I can’t just hand this off to you, just like that. He gives you the key, that’s between you and him.”

Shortly after that, however, my neighbor’s mail began appearing in with mine, and as a result I learned some things about him. For instance: his first name was “Darius,” last name “Mies” or “Mieskowicz”; he was eligible for several major credit cards; and apparently his subscription to Guitar Player had run out. Also, I learned it was exactly five brisk strides from my door across the hall to his and with an ear pressed to the door, one got a thrumming, submarine hum—which was either coming from the apartment or from inside one’s own ear. The door handle was icy and, when turned, opened. The mail I’d slid under his door lay scattered on the other side among an accumulated litter of take-out menus.

“Hello,” I asked into the darkness. I felt something move, and as I was piecing together a reason why I was bothering him, I heard a voice.

“Hey there!”

I stepped back and shut the door.

The voice had come from above me. It was a neighbor, coming down the steps. She appeared on the second-floor landing holding a potted plant.

“Locked out?” She was young, pretty.

“I wasn’t thinking,” I said, and then, patting myself down, “I must have left them in my other jacket.” Even as I said it I realized that I wasn’t wearing a jacket. Or shoes.

“Do you have a fire escape?” She leaned the plant onto her hip and jingled the keys in her pocket. “Because, if you promise you’re not a burglar or a rapist, I could let you climb down through mine.”

“No,” I said. “I mean, there’s no fire escape.”

She gestured with her chin at my neighbor’s apartment. “You live there?”

“Yes,” I said. We both regarded the crooked gold sticker-stencils, “2B,” on the door with the measured silence one gives to a painting at an art gallery.

“Because the guy I’m staying at’s is right above you,” she said, “and there’s a fire escape up there. That’s weird, isn’t it? It should come down right outside your window.”

Sweat prickled my scalp. I felt strangely disoriented in this lie, expecting at any moment my neighbor to open the door and ask what was going on. “The problem is,” I said, “I do, but the window that goes out to it’s locked.”

She seemed satisfied with this. A moment of silence passed.

“It’s probably best,” she said. “I’m only crashing there while he’s away. He’d be pissed if he came back and found out I let some stranger into his place, right? I’m totally the worst housesitter! Look at this thing.”

She held out the plant, which I noticed now was dead. It rattled as she turned it this way, then that, dry husks floating to the floor by her feet. “I need to find a replacement. But do you think that’ll work?”

I shifted my posture—the whole time I’d been holding onto the door knob, which had become warm in my palm—and before I knew what I’d done, my wrist turned and the door clicked open.

This, of course, didn’t escape her notice.

“Wow,” she said. “That’s lucky! You should have that fixed, huh? Just think if you actually were a burglar or a rapist. Well of course if it were actually you, you’d be doing it to yourself, so I guess it wouldn’t be so bad, or at least not a crime. But if it was me? I could just go on in there and do whatever I wanted, wreak havoc, which for me is, like, not watering your plants.”

She seemed to be waiting for me to make a move.

I said, “There’s a hardware store down on Seventh that has plants in the window. I don’t know if they’re for sale, but it’s worth a shot, I guess.” My cheek muscles ached from smiling politely. I examined my socks. It occurred to me that she knew I was lying, and was, for some reason, playing coy. Was this a dare? I let the conversation lapse, but she continued to wait there. I stood my ground until I couldn’t stand it anymore. The only place for me to go now seemed to be through my neighbor’s door. “Well,” I said, “Good luck.” I turned and stared at the rusty nameplate beneath the peephole for a moment before stepping inside.

It was cold in here, and still. I swayed awhile just on the other side of the shut door, listening for her footfalls down the steps. Through an open window somewhere a truck rumbled past. I felt along the wall for a light and turned it on.

The place was empty.

She says, everything happens somewhere. Directs those eyes like lighthouse beams someplace west. Doesn’t find what she needs. Looks at her feet. What she is out here: alone. It’s not so bad.

When he landed he was only sixteen and piloting a light craft. One wing bent earthward and the old man slumping. Alone among planes of sand. Goggles to keep out the glare, met no one for hours by his watch. In three o’clock radiance he rested under a shelf of rock.

Finally, the watch full of sand. Moon rising on the white edge of dunes. He waited and walked in nighttime. Sliced the fleshy plants. Sap like meat.

There was a cord around his waist pulling him north, polish to keep his goggles black and clear, no one asking him who or what, or where the old man left his bones for animals to pick.
Like this, he walked out of the desert.

For the longest time it was a speck on the horizon, a cliché she would have lied and said she dreamt if anyone asked. No one was there to ask. One day it was a larger speck and then all of a sudden it was a boy her size. She sat under the azalea to wait, watched his knees pass by, stop a ways down the road. He could smell her where she hadn’t washed, she thought. Both of them settled in to wait a while.

She hated to give away the secret: the boy had no eyes, only a pair of smokeblack glasses. His face was a dialect of stars reflecting. What if dust rose up? Out would come the cloth. The miniature bottle of polishing fluid. He walked like a ragtime piano. The little strings she wrapped around her fingers pulled toward him.

In between times she consoles herself with a battered Oxford English. The smell of leather, something like shaving cream she imagines. When she picks up the book she is touching something she’s waited for. The pages sigh, or she does. Inside the dictionary everything is always the same as it ever was: a television, phonograph, or radio cabinet that stands on the floor; a desk-like structure containing the keyboards, pedals, etc. of an organ; the control unit, oh, she thinks, the brain.

It’s true her leg was missing. Sometimes when the uncle was awash in spirits he’d lead her out into barbed wilderness and wonder with her which direction it had gone. The new leg creaking. It had been a doll’s leg, porcelain as a bathtub. Sometimes you just can’t trust your own body not to run off, she thinks.

The boy has never seen it. Or anything. But he imagines the flexing muscles of the rabbit move like the ocean and in any case its smell is also salt. Under his insistent hand the rabbitbody moves uncomfortable. But it is so small. Part wants to open the sternum, feel the muscled valves pump and spray. That decision is permanent so he just waits, feels the animal know his danger, feels the heart-motor run: fast, faster. Smells the wet air.

At dinnertime the uncle brings a jar of olives out of the sack to put in the cupboard to take out for dinner when the aunt would come from the store to eat and the uncle’s hand would stop scrabbling. Olives with pimento, small red pepper the ninety-nine-cent jar. The cheap uncle. Doll’s-leg cringes away from strap.

Chicken bone, kid glove, clock. Seven mason jars full of dust, another full of soot. Glass door of the drugstore. Crack down the street’s center line. Yesterday’s apple blossoms pressed flat as a kiss between pages of a leather-covered book. Yellow brick limestone slate roof thatch roof pavestone skipstone beggarman thief.

The uncle likes the smell of the ocean parts. Where he was in the army was full of ocean and the smell of ocean. He presses his nose to them. At night she puts them in their proper places. The uncle likes things out and messy. If they’re put away just right he might not find them next time.

But sometimes the boy is there in the dark pretending to be a branch that moves air syrupslow out her window. The new leg asleep in its cradle next to her bed dreaming peaceful dreams—the branch or the boy scratches the pane and she lies still as last night’s pan fish. If her sash is up he’ll whistle—low—and make her look, give away her wakefulness, and then: can I know your name? in his brokenbottle voice. She whispers: ——

The azalea blooms. Some of its branches break. Sometimes the light in the house above the dining table tosses color onto the road. Sometimes he can hear the aunt laughing to the uncle. Sometimes he looks up into the trees. Feels her eyelashes close featherquick on cheek. Counts her blinks by the hour.

The bicycle in the garage has one flat tire and no brakes but it’s cheerfully red. Basket waving tatters of a checkered bow. Left handlebar: rubber bulb of a horn shreds and peels. Over breakfast she tells the aunt she’ll take hot lunch that day. Tells schoolteacher she’s walking home, noonhour. Sits in the motey slant of windowshine, polishes that worn-out chrome as if there’s no—tomorrow not even a thought.

Schoolteacher commands politeness, lifts it up on a platter of gold stars. Manners count. Rows of stars count. She counts them out loud for the class. Her glasses chain jingles as she moves, its fifty-four links glinting lively into the dark puff of hair. She counts on their manners, arm fat jiggling as the 14-carat tinkles above. Never counted on the two of them in next-door desks, passing notes on the rachis of a roseleaf. Rows, not roses, schoolteacher expounds. She doesn’t know how many stars they have, anyway: so many they can’t be counted in numbers smaller than ∞.

Aren’t the notes a promise. Don’t they say I’ll build you a house, with the vines on it you like. A hexagonal window. Little wires throwing sparks, a switch and a bare bulb, a built-in table, Murphy bed, two goosedown pillows, redchecked cloth, a pitcher and bowl for serving, three silver spoons and matching forks, an old knife and slab. Matching plates with apples painted on. A little garden down below. Promises growing up through the foundation. Linen sheets and a rope to hang you with.

Cusp of winter, she stands on a frozen lake and watches the world dilute. She was going crazy in the little room, the slabbody of the uncle in every corner like saltpork. White and unappetizing. The cold months hang over her head, a string of dried fish, and her body begins the process of living without her. Hair and shakes. What she’s hungry for they haven’t stored up in that house for quite some time.

When he is breathing in the alley sometimes he can feel the tips of his fingers glow blueblack and then he knows someone is there. In the perfect building of his mind he stands guard over the town. Eyes masked, all-seeing. Keep The Girl out of villain-reach, swing her up on a magic rope, the sound of his cape. Then she passes him quiet as a ——. He hears the girl moving in his darkness, the smell of lilies-of-the-valley, her fear like a struck cat. Wants to go with her wherever she is hurrying.

He is a hard nut to crack. Next to her under schoolteacher’s rigid gaze he slips loganberries, a rusted flange into her palm. She hopes. Hides his gifts under the mattress. In the house of the uncle she tries to be invisible but the little presents make her body take shape. He can’t see her, makes her want to be seen.

Someone wonders where the uncle’s voice is. Whether it is laying cutthroat in a gutter. She would answer in the paper tongue that house taught, the voice of the uncle is handmade lace along the pillow’s edge. But this is not the uncle’s story.

What it is: open bluegrass chords on mandolin, the slow fiddle’s keening. Under the bleachers music wraps her like a shawl. Fringes touching her gooseskin. The taste of sweet tea. Shape of the window on her nightwalls, her right leg talking pretty to her left, hands clapping a double-time singsong with the red-sweater girls at school. Bird in the hand.

Walking along the curb, she notices violets beginning to poke through cracks. The shade of a police car. She remembers a matching tin one, its rubber wheels, carpet fuzz tangled in treads. When the boy comes out of the drugstore, she follows him. Alley to alley. Whether he can smell her or not he doesn’t say, anything. She gathers her memories: railroad, dogwood, a mismatched deck of playing cards; tracks him into deep shade on meadow’s edge, touches his back, watches his face change. Leaves lilacs and little dreams tossing in the wake of her sprintaway.

How many people can one girl, slight-built, weak in sports, easily distracted, plain grown pretty, love in one lifetime? What is it makes that sharpsweet first taste of soda bread, trace of wool on the tongue, and how to name what never belonged to her, never could? And who can love her? The touch of hand on skin like fine thread cotton. Once things are fed and taken care of, every saucer proper in its proper place, who is going to name the way her arm muscles ache—what for?

A lot of things come in shapes with two edges. Hatchets. For example. The aunt is fond of saying her coming to live with them is a double-edged sword. She thinks, no, more like a cross to bear. What the sense would be of a blade with just one edge she doesn’t know. You want to cut the person on the way out, just like on the way in.

After everyone is sleeping there is time to curl beneath the wood shaving bench, listen for footsteps to the basement door, the trembling jars of relish and the girl brave among scraps of flaky pine. Or to run. She holds a thin spoon between her fingers, wonders what time the last light will pop into darkness, plans route after route through the midnight house.

At six in the morning something singing is in the bracken of his mind: it is no everyday. Fingers to the delicate tray of ear, glossy spectacles. Creaking out of the house, the boy with no eyes feels his way through the blossoming-unfamiliar garden. Radish bodies, potatoes budding tiny underground, the silk of dill new to flower. Tingles his palms. Leaves a blind dust on his shirt. Touches tomato leaves, feel aphids march battleward on fingernail. All new.

And if all this exists? Girl who speaks to the wolf-boy. Boy with pads of callus thick like two years on his feet. Tonight they can steal away in a red boat blue on the inside. And the sea and the boat and the bodies rocking. If she’s never been on the water before, all right; if he doesn’t know which way is north. They’ll point toward shore.

 

Éireann Lorsung was born and raised in Minneapolis. Her poetry collection, Music for Landing Planes By, was published by Milkweed Editions earlier this year. Lorsung received an MFA in writing and BA degrees in English and Japanese from the University of Minnesota; she has also studied at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy. She currently lives in Nottingham, England, where she is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural studies.

 

I go over and over the day that the blue girl drowned, and still I can’t think why I didn’t help. I turn it over in my mind, that first image of her out in the lake, already blue, the girl who turned blue and stayed blue, the girl who drowned and yet still lives. Why didn’t I jump in, why didn’t I swim out to her? Why did I leave it to Irene’s poor Audrey, fifteen like my Caroline and always so nervous, the kind of girl who should never have seen such blueness up close. I should have gotten up and swam, out to the buoys where you’re not supposed to go. I was never afraid of water. I knew I wouldn’t drown, if there’s one thing I’ve known all my life it’s that I’ll never drown. But I was not the one to go.

To watch someone drown is a terrible thing. To watch her revived is even worse. To watch a girl who was already blue and who stays blue even after she breathes, this is the worst thing I can imagine. In all my years at the lake as a child, I never saw someone drown, I never saw anyone fall into a deep pocket or even cough up swallowed water. At this lake in this town I learned to swim when the water still looked like glass. I taught my own children to swim when they were babies with their faces in the water first. Don’t be afraid, I’d say, it’s only water.
I used to be one of the summer people. But no more. I stayed. People say that there are only a few of us who stayed, and I am one. I used to love this town when I was one of the summer people, but now it’s just a town like any other town, except for the blue girl, who’s made everything different, even the things I cannot name.

My parents brought me to this lake when I was a child. They came from Russia and made money in textiles. They told me, Magda, marry well, marry safe, forget happiness, there is no happiness in marriage. Their marriage had been arranged, and they played pinochle and took their children to a beach to watch them swim in a quiet lake in a quaint summer town. They said that the kind of people who could take their children away to summer in a cottage were the kind of people we should know. I remember sitting on my mother’s lap while she rubbed lemon in my hair to bring out streaks and watching the lake that looked like glass. I remember my brothers throwing stones to make ripples and how I stepped into the largest ripple just before it broke apart. If I could stay inside the ripple, I used to think, if only I could stay. Anything would be possible.

And so I found that I could stay. I met a town boy with long hair and gangly limbs and got myself pregnant out at that lake. We danced in the ripples. My parents wept. They said, this boy will bring you no kind of happiness, Magdalena, and I said, to hell with happiness, you said so yourself. Mama wept more and said, who ever said such things to you? And I hugged her and said, you did, Mama, you did.

Year after year, the town grew more dull. Maybe we were waiting for the blue girl all along, without even knowing it. The lake filled with algae, and the summer people looked more tired. The children grew. My parents died. My brothers said they had never seen our parents so happy as they had been in old age, playing pinochle and telling Russian jokes. The town boy became a man who still keeps his hair long and no longer makes me laugh. One day when the children were fighting, Greg and Caroline, Greg the boy who kept me here and the sensible Caroline who reminds me why I wanted to stay, I drove out to the lake to throw stones. They skimmed the water the way my brothers had taught me when we were summer people and embarrassed by our parents’ English. When the ripples floated out toward me, I went into the lake in my jeans and sandals and stood until the ripple broke through my body. The next day, the blue girl came from nowhere, out beyond the lake in the trees. She moved slowly, but her skin flashed. At first I alone saw her, and I thought, I will stay. Now I will have to stay.

I tell the blue girl lies.

In my bed at night when I see traces of the town boy in my man-husband, I sing, Tell me your secrets, I’ll tell you no lies. He smiles and says, you used to sing to me all the time, do you remember? I smooth back the graying hair with my fingers, an old habit, and say, no, I don’t. What did I sing?

Of course I remember. But there is such a thing as telling too much, my mother used to say. It’s better to lie.

Greg stomps in the kitchen. When I named him Gregorio and nicknamed him Greg, Mama took him in her arms and said, this boy will always be a boy, Magda, this Gregorio, this Greg the Boy. He has always been impetuous, my son, and reluctant to take direction, even at three and a half. Try to teach him to ride a tricycle, this boy knew better. But this is new, this swearing. I don’t remember my brothers talking the way he does. Mama was right about him. Greg the Boy.

He throws his sneakers on the floor and says, this blue girl, everyone wants to know how does someone get so blue? How does someone get that blue and still be alive?

This is the son who kept me here, who caught inside me became this freckled, lanky boy. Such a boy, this boy is, defying me with talk of the blue girl. He wants a rise out of me, and I won’t give in.

I say nothing to him, and he says, I’m going to go find her out there, out by the lake, a bunch of the guys and me, we’re going to go find that blue girl and see why she’s so blue.

Mama taught me well.

I say, listen, boy, this is no way to talk in my house, and you will go nowhere near that girl, not if I have a thing to say about it.

I can play his game.

He laughs and says, Ma, you are such a gas.

He fishes around in his pockets, his head slung low like it’s too heavy to carry, like he hopes his head will snap off. I know the feeling. But I am trying to bake because we’re meeting tonight, and I need to make moon pies. I had never heard of moon pies before this, before Irene said we should visit the blue girl and bake moon pies to offer her for our failure to save her. She called this morning and said, we need to go, tonight, Magda, tonight is one of those nights, and I said, don’t worry, we’ll go, all you have to do is ask.

I think of the blue girl and look over at Greg with his sloping shoulders and grabbing hands, and I say, get out of my kitchen, boy, you are failing biology.

He says, how the hell do you know?

I say, I have my ways.

I pluck marshmallows from the bag and arrange them in the pot to melt. He’s failed biology three times, this boy who kept me here, this boy who cannot understand cells when it was the splitting of cells that made me stay in this sorry town.

Zygote, I say, and whack him with my spoon.

He says, what’s that? and I say, you should know, my boy, you of all people should know, and he lumbers out of the room with his hands at his sides, his arms like puppets with the hands broken.

The marshmallows bubble in the pot. White liquid simmers and draws circles around itself. This is the best part, the stirring as the bubbles rise up and then pop. I move my spoon around and around, stabbing at bubbles with the wooden handle. This is where I spoon in the lies. I imagine each circling bubble opening up and taking them in, one lie at a time.

Little white lies, tiny bubbles, my life in a pot.

Tiny bubbles, I start to sing.

Caroline shuffles into the kitchen. Her hair is pinned back in barrettes, very unflattering with the zigzag part all the girls are wearing now. When she came down the stairs this morning, she leaned down to show me her scalp and the butterfly clasps that held the hair back from her forehead, which is much too large for her smallish face, and she asked me how I liked her hair. I said, very much.

Tiny bubbles, tiny bubbles. I don’t know the rest of the words.
She leans against the sink with her arms crossed over her chest. The butterflies look t
rapped.

Mama, you look so happy when you make those little pies, she says.
I turn to her and toss a marshmallow to her from the bag. She’s getting thick about the waist, the Russian blood coming out in her with her heavy hands and squat legs. If only Mama had lived to see this.

I say, who said anything about making pies?

The marshmallow disappears inside her mouth. I throw another and another to make her laugh. Anything to keep her from my pies.

Greg’s failing biology again, she says.

The whiteness thickens. I stir and stir. The cakes are still in the oven, not quite ready for their sticky filling.

I know, I say. I have my ways, you kids should know, I have my ways.
Under the cabinet I find my oven mitts, a pair with faded sunflowers Mama bought me when I first got married. She said, to bake bread for that blond boy husband, but I’ve never baked bread for him, not a day in my life. Moon pies are all I can manage.

The cakes are perfectly round. I’ve never seen cakes so round. I let out a little whoop inside myself so Caroline doesn’t hear. She can’t have a mother whooping about the kitchen, it will give her ideas. The blue girl’s mouth appears inside my mind, open, with blue skin giving way to pink tongue. Like a cat’s except without ridges.

Are those for us? Caroline asks. I’m hungry.

I am ever the disappointing mother.

No, I say, and when she looks down at her sneakers and bends to tie the laces, I say, I’m making something special for you. These are for the bake sale, too sweet, anyway, no good, they’ll rot those beautiful teeth.

This much is true. If Caroline has one beautiful thing, it is her teeth. They shine. Even as a child, her baby teeth almost glowed. At the lake the summer people would stop me as I paddled her in the water and ask, how do you get your baby’s teeth so white?

I’d say, baking soda.

They’d look at their own babies’ teeth with the milky film across them and squint their eyes at me.

A remedy from the old country, I’d say.

A long time ago, a lifetime ago, really, I rented a lovely summer house by the sea. Not exactly by the sea, but close enough, and it had a big pool, and five bedrooms and a sunroom and an English box garden and you could see the ocean from a widow’s walk on the roof. It was owned by these two interior decorators so everything was just so and it was all kind of perfectly done in an English country house kind of way and filled with light and shadow. It was everything my apartment in town wasn’t and it was just swell.

It was like being in an episode of Masterpiece Theater. All you needed was an under housemaid arranging flowers in cut-glass vases.

This was before. A lifetime away from the life I live now. This was more than a decade ago, just as the great tailgate party was coming to an end, and I had an almost infinite amount of money. Or so it seemed.
This was the summer I told the same funny story over and over until people started calling me Billy Champagne, which was the punch line of the story.

I worked on The Street, and while I didn’t particularly enjoy bilking little old ladies in Cleveland out of their life savings, I had a conscience and it bothered me to think of those little old ladies in their little houses in front of their little TV sets with their little cats thinking they were about to strike it rich or at least be able to get maybe a bigger TV and feed the cat when in fact they were about to strike out, most of them, not all, but most, still, the money was fantastic and the roll, the flow of it was like mainlining every day. The roll smelled like money. You could feel the poison boiling through your veins.

I worked in a big room that was basically like a casino; there were no windows, no clocks, nothing but the relentless flicker of financial news on dozens of TV sets. It was both timeless and relentless. It was basically like playing one-on-one basketball for ten hours a day, followed by fat stogies in the cigar room at Frank’s and big steaks and then on to clubs where we swaggered in our monogrammed Sea Island cotton shirts and $200 scarf ties from Hermès and sat in the VIP section and ran up $2,000 bar bills and took town cars home at three in the morning when we had to be back at the office at seven-thirty. We did things like write our phone numbers on girls’ tits with Mont Blanc pens, and they always called us back. Always.

You could smoke then, that’s how long ago it was.

This was life. This was everyday life, and we didn’t understand people who didn’t live like this. We were the curl of the zeitgeist and we were all young and mostly good looking and we all found time to work out like dogs, weird times like six in the morning, so we had these fantastic bodies, well, not all of us had fantastic bodies, some had the spindly hollow-eyed stares of junkies and some topped three hundred pounds and smoked three packs of cigarettes a day; but I’m thinking about the guys who came to the house that summer, we were all in perfect shape and had the kind of women you get when you have a fantastic body and a wad of cash and the utter arrogance that comes with having the big dog on the leash.

We were the people people wrote about when they wrote about the evils of contemporary society. We made too much money. We spent too much money. We didn’t do a single thing to help the less fortunate, which included most of the people on the planet. We drank too much. We did too many drugs. We had eighteen-year-old kids with rasta braids coming to drop shit off in the middle of the day. We went to Alphabet City the minute we turned our computers off for the night. We felt not one ounce of remorse. We only felt pity for the rest of the gray masses. All of these things were true. But, man, did we have fun. It was like a giant testosterone flambé.

Bonuses were a big thing. Bonuses were given out in yards, a yard being a million dollars. People would say, sucking on a big fat Cubano, that they got a yard or a yard and a half. Everybody lied, of course, but everybody got a lot and it was a big deal.

I wasn’t the brightest nickel in the bag, but I had the best education, and I was as aggressive as a pit bull, I could trade shit for silk, and so I was good for half a yard. I was thirty-one.

After I paid off the taxes and my enormous bills—I owed Bergdorf’s $12,000, which was basically three suits, two cashmere sweaters and a bottle of Aqua di Parma, the same cologne Cary Grant wore—I still had quite a pile, and I decided to get my own house in the Hamptons. Not just any house, the house.

I had shared before. Little bungalows on Gin Lane. I had gone through the ritual of being a houseguest—my mother once said when you’re a houseguest, don’t ring the doorbell with anything but your elbow, so I took cases of champagne and new badminton sets from Hammacher Schlemmer—so I knew what I wanted was a palace of my own, where I could invite people every weekend, and have them bring me lavish and largely unusable stuff.

I looked at six houses. I took the sixth one. It was chintzed and striped and leopard printed, stuff that would charm women, and it had a grand piano and a deck from which you could smell the sea, and the pool and the garden and service for thirty. It was English aristocracy without the dog shit and the cigarette burns in the upholstery.

Someone witty once said to me that living in a castle wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. “Darling,” she said, “you still have to wash your hair in the bathtub.”

I had never been in an English country house. I thought this was the real thing. I took it immediately. It cost $96,000, Memorial Day to Labor Day, and I wrote a check. The house came with a maid, so the owners could feel safe about their fabulous stuff, and she cost another $800 a week which I paid by check, and I leased a car for the summer, a deeply impressive convertible Mercedes, midnight black, with every accoutrement you could wish for and the smell of brand-new leather and a top which slid back with the touch of a button, slid back as silently as a snake through the grass. This was a very nice car. I gave them my platinum card.

I bought sheets in the city for every bedroom, from Frette, since the sheets that were there were the kind of clever pastiche designed to make you think maybe Kmart was a good idea after all. My guests would sleep in 600 thread count cotton, white with scalloped borders, so the cool night air could pass over their bodies like a lover’s kiss.

I still have the sheets. Quality lasts.

I found a huge Moroccan tent in the city and bought it for $25,000 and had it put up on the lawn and filled it with benches and silk pillows and those low kind of Moroccan tables and hung with chandeliers so it was like being in a fantasy seraglio, all about sex. It was hot as hell in there, like being at a rinky-dink circus on a July afternoon in Reno, but it was beautifully embroidered and dotted with thousands of tiny little mirrors and it was breathtakingly beautiful.

From the second story of the house, you looked down at the roof of it, or whatever tents have, and it was like looking down at the stars, with all the mirrors twinkling, and the candles glowing softly through the canvas.

The first weekend, I invited George who was hysterical, and Frank, who was enormous, 6’4”, just to show I wasn’t filled with self-doubt, and Fanelli and Teddy. I took two days off from work to stock the house, bread and desserts from the Barefoot Contessa, $30-a-pound lobster salad from Loaves and Fishes, and all kinds of salads and hors d’oeuvres and candy and cakes from all over and vegetables from the Green Thumb. And liquor, Jesus. Everything you could imagine. I even stopped by the road and bought tall flowers to go in all those vases, and little bunches in every room, and when I was done the whole thing looked like an at-home Vogue shoot showing how some English heiress lived when she was tired of town and longed for the simple life.

<p
>Friday night, they all showed up, with the girls, and I picked up my girl Susanne from the Jitney, and we were a household. The girls, frankly, were the least of it. Everybody assumed they would be beautiful and pliable and enviable and basically disposable. So all summer the house was the five guys and whatever the cat dragged in.

And the presents. Like Christmas all over again. George brought a case of 1986 Romanée-Conti Montrachet, God knows where he found it, and Frank brought a picnic hamper from Bergdorf’s with real china plates and Fanelli, who was a thug, brought a Z of really good coke, and Teddy brought ten white beach towels with my initials on them, every monogram a different color.

We drank rum drinks that came out of a blender. Frank claimed he’d never seen a blender before and Teddy said he’d never tasted rum. His mother told him it was the devil’s drink and taught him never to touch it. He got over that pretty fast, and Frank became a whizmaster at making blended drinks because he was mechanically inclined, he said.

The household was perfect. It was a complete universe, all by itself. We ate butterflied leg of lamb on the Weber super grill, and we drank rum and Montrachet until we were silly and did many, many lines of fine white cocaine, but only after we’d eaten the lamb with this ninety-dollar-a-bottle Burgundy I had laid in and we smoked Cuban cigars until the whole angst of the week had worn away and we went to bed at two in the morning to sleep with these beautiful girls and the sex was not quiet and every human sensuality was redolent in the quiet night air.

The next morning, everybody was fresh as a daisy. Juices were poured, omelets got made and eaten out on the sunporch, and then Bloody Marys got made and drunk out by the pool, and then the guys went off to play tennis. We knew this one guy, a yard and a half at least, who had hired a tennis pro for the summer to come every Saturday afternoon, so we got to going over there, knocking balls around while their women looked on and read novels, us quick-footed in our three-hundred-dollar-Prada tennis shorts and our raggedy old T-shirts from Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami, Florida, and places like that, just to show we weren’t fashion pussies.

We were the kind of people who got their pictures in Hamptons magazine. We were the kind of people who dressed in Nantucket red linen trousers to go to the Hamptons Classic Horse Show. We could get into Nick and Tony’s on thirty minutes’ notice. That kind of people.
The second weekend, we really found the perfect thing to round out the house. We found a pet.

Her name was Giulia de Bosset. I found her at a party.

She came up to me at the bar while I was getting more drinks for everybody and she looked straight at me and said, “I know you.” As though we were in the middle of some conversation already.

“I’m sorry. I don’t…what?”

“I know you. I met you when you were still at Hopkins. I was just a little girl.”

It turned out she was the baby sister of the college roommate of this extremely thin girl I used to date, and so we rehashed old times, and I asked her where she was staying and she said she was staying at the God-forsaken Maidstone Club, of all places, with all those old farts, so I told her to come stay with us, where at least she could get some peace and quiet without somebody whacking golf balls all over the places.

Things were different then. We spit at golf.

So she came. We picked up her things at two in the morning, and she came and slept in the little maid’s room off the kitchen which she said was just fine with her, anywhere but that mausoleum.

She was a waif. She was like Audrey Hepburn, not that I knew who Audrey Hepburn was at the time. That was just one piece of information that hadn’t been downloaded yet.

Later, I kept hearing her name, especially when she died, so I went and rented all these old movies and boy, she was something and boy, was she ever like Giulia de Bosset. I bet neither one of them ever went to a dance where they had to get their hands stamped if they wanted to get back in.

Giulia was naïve and quiet and had chopped-off hair and lived in the East Village where nobody lived in those days, and she would tell funny stories about finding guys shooting up on her stairs, and she talked about getting mugged by those same guys and she obviously had money and we were all intrigued and we just adored her and so we asked her back. And she came.