A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  “Mmmm,” the woman hummed. It seemed to be a tic. We thought it was a clever tic for a woman to adopt, as it filled the silence and could be read into well: a sign of approval, contentment, sympathy, or agreement.

  As for a woman with a clever tic in a dripping coat offering to represent us, that was something we didn’t think we needed but also something we didn’t think we needed to do without either. Particularly now that she was here in our foyer and had given us her card. The question was, did girls need representation? If so, by whom? And were we entertaining the notion of the woman with the clipboard as our representative simply because she was the only candidate or because she was one possible older version of ourselves? Was this a problem? Might we be selling ourselves short? And what exactly did girls have that ought to be sold? One true fact: her coat was dripping on our floor.

  “Would you like San Carlo Rodeos? They’re Italian Fritos,” we surprised ourselves by saying. There was a drawer in our kitchen filled with foreign versions of American snacks. We assumed they had been a collection of our late father.

  “Maybe,” the woman said.

  “Hang your coat in the shower. Come back next week, and we’ll give you the chips.”

  “I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  Clearly the woman wanted something from us. We wondered if she’d been to the Wanting Beach. Could she be our heroine? Was her wanting acceptable or inexhaustible?

  “Drying takes time,” we said, “and we must find the snacks and empty them into a bowl.”

  The woman stood in her wet boots, said, “Mmmm,” and jotted some more notes on her clipboard paper.

  “The thing is,” we said, “to exit the foyer.”

  We watched her cross to the bathroom, heard her pull the shower curtain aside, and saw her reemerge in a blue dress that was short enough to show her chapped knees. We were surprised she had chapped knees on such a damp day. It added to her lack of authenticity, and also caused a creeping desire to help her. Under the right circumstances, we might teach her what we’d discovered online about not wanting through meditation: observe the want, neither condemning nor indulging it. We wanted her to stay. No one was to blame. We guided her out the door.

  The woman’s appearance made us want our mother. Hold the want in loving awareness. Not the hollow mother who’d left us, but the mother she might have been had she conquered the Wanting Beach, protected by her square teeth and her man’s voice and her breath that smelled of licorice and bitters. Notice how it feels in the body. Our necks were stiff. Our shoulders rose when we inhaled. See how it moves and changes. We had few clues of our mother the way we wanted her, but there was a framed photograph in the hall: a young woman on a lawn with a book, where it seemed she once knew where she ended and others began. We could feel our hearts beat in our throats. When we’d remind her of our father, she’d walk away or sometimes grab us up and kiss us. Softly repeat the name of the want the whole time it is present until it ends. Leonard Cohen came to mind. We took up places around the baby grand piano, and expected the song would be there, either in the form of sheet music or memory, but we located neither. One of us hummed a first note. But we could not match it. The same happened when one of us hit a piano key—we were always flat.

  It was a good thing. Not singing. Because, really, if we’d found a melody and sung it in one voice or three-part harmony, there’d have been no telling what could have happened. As it was, we sat down and looked up at the piano’s soundboard from underneath. Surely we were not the only girls who would never sing. People were always losing abilities before they realized they had them, and it was nobody’s fault. Least of all their own.

  Instead of singing, we sat in a circle beneath the piano and invented a memory of our mother in her hair days. Before the Wanting Beach, teaching us to braid: one at a time, she called us into her room where she sat at her dressing table letting us practice on her hair, which was long and dark and smooth. Every hour until bed, we brought the scene to mind, and each time we altered it, adjusting the connections between our neurons, building the story into our synapses: on school days when we were rushing to make the bus, she’d whistle and we’d line up in the hall to braid one another’s hair, with her at the rear. Our hair was finer than our mother’s and shorter, but we imitated her touch down the line: fingers pointed and strong, like rain on the puddle of our scalps. Because she taught us each a different braid, we each went to school with a different hairstyle, depending upon the order in which we stood. … We manipulated, recalled, rewrote. Projected memories were amended into truth. French Braid, Fishtail, Halo.

  “She was an exemplar,” we said.

  “Our succor and our champion.”

  “Not boys on a beach.”

  “Not a woman with a clipboard.”

  We were almost happy, then. We fell lightly into bed as if we were each a specific, answerable question.

  The next morning we slept in. The sun made its way from window to window, and we did not feel the morning’s sharpness. Or we felt it, but passively, like the teeth in our mouths. We looked at one another from our pillows. We wiggled our toes. A mouse crossed the floor and stopped in our communal gaze. We flexed our feet, lifted and held on to them. Bringing our knees to our armpits, we rocked on our backs. Happy Baby.

  When the woman appeared in the foyer again we were in the living room comparing the flexibility of our hamstrings. As a rule we did not compare ourselves to one another (compare and despair), but flexibility seemed an innocuous yet necessary trait to cultivate. People were always spraining, twisting, and breaking parts of themselves for lack of stretching. The super tore his ACL. The bus driver complained of back pain. The art teacher had tennis elbow. Only a pain-free body was a body one could deny.

  “You’re here for the chips,” we said.

  “Mmmm,” she said.

  We made a show of having to search for the Italian chips. In fact, we had organized the snack drawer first thing when our mother disappeared. It was both comforting and disconcerting to realize just how long packaged foods remained edible.

  “Disconcerting,” the woman said. “Mmmm.”

  We had not been aware that we’d said the adjective aloud, which was itself disconcerting but also comforting. Perhaps someone understood us.

  The woman was rounder than we’d remembered. And pinker. The wet coat then might be a sort of camouflage. There was so much for a woman to cover up.

  “Do you ever not wear the coat?” we asked.

  “The wanting coat?” We stopped our stretching. Did she say wanting or haunting?

  “Bring it to us,” we said.

  The woman crossed to the bathroom from where we heard a shake as of a bullfighter with his cape. She reemerged wearing her dry coat. We surrounded her, feeling for pockets, but there were none. We decided she must not have said wanting, but taunting.

  “Here’s a list of common emotional triggers”—she handed us her clipboard—“needs people react to when they’re unmet. Which are yours?”

  “None,” we said, stepping back, not looking at her list.

  “Mine’s Acknowledgment, and Being Liked.”

  “Actually,” we said, looking now, “Safety, and Being Right.”

  “Mmmm.”

  Uncomfortable silence ensued. We felt it in our chests.

  We remembered the snacks and brought them out in a bowl decorated like a Holstein cow. Our parents had acquired a large selection of mismatched crockery from years of living communally in various ideological settings.

  “Did I hear you sing earlier?”

  “No,” we said.

  “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.”

  “What are you after?” we asked, feeling an agitation in our legs.

  “Same as you,” the woman said, “hunger without fear.” She was hunched over the corn snacks, smelling but not eating them. “In the meantime,” she lifted her head from the bowl, “I have more apar
tments to approach.”

  That evening, we found the woman’s pen in the bathroom. It must have fallen when she’d played the torero. A gold-nibbed fountain pen with sandalwood barrel, it was not the type of pen we could keep without guilt. We thought we’d look into the real estate agency’s office. Ask for the woman. We prepared as best we could for any eventuality—practiced everything from rolling our r’s to roundhouse kicks. We surprised ourselves with the variety of our as-of-yet unused talents. In the morning, we drank green tea. Ate a handful of roasted pepitas. Sometimes our apartment offered up nutrition, other times only stinkbugs.

  We walked single file through the open office door of Coastal Realtors. We pondered the name and found it wanting. Sometimes it was easier to find things outside of ourselves that wanted. Sharing a sense of deficiency with the entire known world made it less lonely to be away from home.

  There were women at desks who looked up at our arrival, then back down again. Was it because we were youngish? Palish? Smelled of nothing? The woman from the business card was not there among the so-called Realtors. We found the term laughable as there’d been little that had felt real about the woman who’d visited us, particularly now that she was not to be found in her purported place of business.

  “May I help you?” one of the women finally said. We tried to imagine ourselves as grown women, not wanting to help but pretending to. We would be smarter than these women; we would not be in blouses behind desks. But who would we be? And where were the women who demonstrated anything at all that did not look like a euphemism for woman? A phone rang; a chair squeaked; outside, a truck backed up and the shop filled with its warning beeps. We spun in our sneakers and left.

  As soon as we’d exited the agency, we spotted her, about a block away, her back to us, standing at a bus stop in the coat. We hurried toward her.

  “You left this,” we said, holding out the pen.

  The woman turned around. She looked grateful and reached out to take the pen, but it was not her. Embarrassed, we pocketed the pen and, pretending we’d just heard our names called, we ran. Across the street and down the block.

  And because our legs were already running, and running felt like what our legs were meant for, we ran on. We watched ourselves flash by in store windows. Saw it clearly: the want in our eyes, pointless and burning. Greedy as curiosity. We told ourselves we were young and that was to be expected. Wants might arrive, but we did not have to serve them. We picked up speed. We ran past children climbing fences. We reminded ourselves, want would always be dangerous. Would bring us to the attention of the authorities. We ran past men at tables strumming their thighs. We tried to reason with ourselves: treat want as pilot light—flame enough to get up in the morning but not enough to combust. By the time our mother left, she was burning blue. We bit the insides of our cheeks. We sprinted faster down the road, past beggars in hats, past preachers with flyers.

  We felt our want building, channeling, filling us. Not leaking through our eyes like our mother’s but concentrated, unadulterated in our girl bodies, until we became magnets with vector fields, pointed and irresistible. Want as weapon, want as shield; attracting all that was deprived, repelling all that was obliged. Things began to stick to us; things began to fall away. Our sight grew keen and panoramic; we could see ahead to the shore and the ocean beyond and also behind to the line of people some distance back and following. Our clothes grew heavy and peeled off of us as we slowed to a walk, breathing deeply. We passed our house and continued to the end of the road. New words formed on our lips. Seeds sprouted from our footprints. Our fists filled with coins; we were suddenly aware of the muscles in our arms; the day turned a new color.

  Then in the torque of the new magnetic field, something powerful took hold of us. A want so strong we were temporarily paralyzed. We shared a look that said we all wanted the same thing, and we all wished one of us would do what we all wanted, but none of us wanted to do it. We were afraid. Then something pushed us—a gust of wind or a feather, and we headed forward to the Wanting Beach.

  A hot breeze lifted off the sand, and in the magnetic moment we suddenly recalled the list of needs that could be unmet. Recalling them gave them presence in the afternoon heat. Needs and wants began to confuse themselves, and the air felt tangled and thick. Slowly, we squatted. Tapping into our downward flowing energy, we passed the pen from one to the other and cut our names into the beach. One by one we engraved them. Then, feet together, knees apart, pelvis on heels, we leaned forward and lowered our heads. At first our arms hung like garlands around us. Then slowly we swung them forward and back, digging wings into the sand. The surf filled our molds with foam, and we had never felt so ready. The sand was dark and wet. The sky was low.

  Reflections on the Real Joe Dicostanzo

  Samuel R. Delany

  —For Leiza Brown

  Joe Dicostanzo was a young Italian American, whom, in 1968, I picked up one August night and brought back to my ground-floor rear apartment at 642 East Sixth Street. He was twenty-six years old, as was I. We had a two-/three-week affair. Like me, Joe had been married (at something like seventeen—and divorced at nineteen). I believe he and his wife had a child, a daughter whom his mother was raising, down in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where she lived—and where Joe had grown up.

  It was a hot August night in 1968 in New York City.

  Who were we?

  We were young men who had grown up listening to Orson Welles declare weekly on the radio, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows … The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay … The Shadow knows!” Whatever confusions we got ourselves entailed with, probably we believed it.

  After a day spent writing and a nap of a few hours, I rose at eleven, twelve, or one and wandered across Eighth Street and down to Christopher and Sheridan Square, to make my way to the overhead highway and the trucks parked beneath it, edging the city’s west strip, with its dilapidated docks and warehouses (nothing remains of that now: it has all been converted into ground-level highway and park). That night the cruising activity among the trucks was high. And I found myself at the back of an open van parked deep among the others, in which a number of guys were getting in and out a little more frequently than any of the others in sight, which suggested that the activity inside was particularly vigorous.

  While a couple of guys in jeans and T-shirts were leaving, I climbed in. It was pitch-black (a night within a night …)—but soon I had figured out that there were between ten and fifteen men in there, all involved with one another. Soon I had been absorbed in their number.

  Memory tells me at this point that, whatever (or whomever) it was I was specifically doing, somewhere to my right I heard someone whisper, “… Oh, my God!” more in awe than fright. A minute later, someone else whispered something like, “What am I supposed to do with this thing, anyway …?” and somebody else (quite probably Joe) chuckled. In the course of moving among those bodies, we connected—and I realized the source of the whispered comments. But what remains far more clearly, however, is the nature of Joe’s movements. In such a situation (without light and among complete strangers), most people move hesitantly, tentatively, wary both of hurting and of being hurt; that is, very inured to rejection. Perhaps because he’d learned—yes, because of his size—few people were going to reject him, however, even in that dark orgiastic knot, Joe moved with a certainty apprehensible from the first time we touched. I liked it, and immediately tried to do the same—and, indeed, because I wasn’t often rejected either, at that time, I probably succeeded. It was not the quick surety of movement that I—and many other men in such a situation—had learned to associate with pickpockets. (And there were pickpockets, now and again availing themselves of the darkness and desire in the backs of the trucks. I was fortunate never to be victimized by one—I never took any money with me when I went there. Others, sadly, had.) This was leisurely and firm, however, and thus clearly something else. Soon, on the strength of
it, Joe and I had pretty much made ourselves a couple in the midst of the orgy. Indeed, neither of us was rejecting other people. But over the next fifteen or twenty minutes, it was also clear that, among the complexities and intertwinings, we were enjoying each other far more than we were the rest. At this point I think it was Joe who whispered into my ear (but, of course, it may have been me who whispered to him): “Hey, you want to get out of here?”

  Whoever answered, that answer was: “Yeah. Sure—come on.”

  So, holding hands, we pulled loose from the others and made our way to the mouth of the van and climbed down—faces clearing for the first time as we did so—onto the asphalt. And I was now able to see the friendly, curious, good-looking young man who was, himself, trying to see who exactly he had picked up for the night.

  By the time we were standing down on the cracked, rubbly paving, clearly we were both satisfied with our choice.

  He was a surprisingly good-looking Italian kid with medium-length black hair. He had no place to go, but I had my own apartment. It was a bit of a walk, I told him, on the Lower East Side all the way across the island to Alphabet City—between Avenues C and D, in a ground-floor apartment at the back of a hall in number 642. On a mattress in the room off the kitchen that served as my bedroom, I learned what really turned him on was lying on his back while I sat on his face, and he tongued my butt and jerked off till he came; then I sucked him. I only got my jeans off one leg, and he just managed to get his opened. Later, the tale came out.

  He’d moved up from Fort Lauderdale in Florida, where he’d lived with his mother. He’d been brought to New York by someone I first assumed was an older man named Max, who owned a house on the western edge of New York City, about two blocks south of where my agent had recently moved with his office, but Joe felt uncomfortable bringing people he’d just met over there. Max was letting him stay in the house but would come over regularly once or twice a week, and Joe would put the fellow on a dog leash and walk him around the rooms in the house. For this, he was allowed to stay there and receive minimal pay, out of which he fed himself. If there was actual sex between them, I was unclear. In that relationship, Joe was the top, whereas with me, clearly he wanted to be the bottom, and I was happy to comply. He was amazingly well-hung. (We’re talking an uncircumcised king-sized Budweiser can!)