Molly Falls to Earth

by Maria Mutch

  “Name is Luna, by the way,” she said.

  “It isn’t,” I answered and turned to leave. “Go away.”

  “Go away,” she said, and I walked as fast as I could back to the apartment.

  * * *

  It seems inevitable to me now that I would end up on the ground a few days later, banging against it.

  Luna

  I wasn’t born here, no. Where I come from doesn’t really matter, or not in the way people think.

  * * *

  See that building over there? The one with the stone cornices that line up with the windows. Everyone knows what a cornice is. This is a sawtooth one and has what looks to be teeth. If you take the time to look—not many do—you can see floral etchings in the stone above the windows. They paid attention in those days. At one time the house was a brothel, but before that it was somebody’s mansion, and the rich person—the family came from Yugoslavia, I think—killed his wife but did so in a methodical manner. Very clever, taking her on a ship across the ocean to Europe for an extended vacation, extended being the operative. Dispensed of her body along the way, and this happened long ago, so her family wasn’t expecting to hear from her for months.

  * * *

  Dropped her bit by bit into the water. Plop. Plop. Or maybe he pushed her whole body over in one go. Big splash, and then she was just a small shape, something unknown, a gull, maybe, sitting on a crest, washing away from the boat. Then gone. So anyway, it was a brothel after that, a good one, and then a place where the people held dogfights in the basement. Imagine the festival of alarm and the stench. If you’re a dog and survive, you get to do it all over again. So that is that building, and now there’s a vintage clothing store, and on the second floor there’s a facialist. I went up, because I wanted to see for myself, but they were disturbed by my presence, how I knocked over a scented candle, and they argued for twenty minutes about how that might have happened.

  * * *

  When people think of this place, they imagine crowds everywhere, but it’s not really true. You can see space if you look, between people and other people, and between buildings and streets and cars. Sometimes space on the subway platform.

  * * *

  Before I got here, I pictured people everywhere. People per square inch. Like those photos of Japanese trains during rush hour where the passengers get packed in tight by people whose job that is. As many as can possibly fit. The whole city like that.

  * * *

  But you can stand in Times Square at five in the morning, especially when it’s cold, and see space. The lights and neon signs are going for nobody in particular, because they don’t know how to stop, but maybe you see a person across the street. They’re walking along, maybe wondering what you’re doing by the statue of Father Duffy, which they don’t really notice, or they don’t know who Duffy was—he was the chaplain for the Fighting 69th and very brave apparently—and why there’s a statue of him. But it’s five in the morning and the lights and signs are performing for this tiny audience. The person sees you for a blink before they no longer see you. And that’s how you disappear.

  * * *

  The people born and raised here—it comes down to one thing, in my humble opinion. Doesn’t matter where their forebears came from, what ship they washed up in, or if they can say their ancestors were here on this island with the bears and the trees before the Dutch and their ideas ever got here. Forget religion, sexual partner, or what they put on their bagel. The folks who were raised here, they are all one thing, which is practical. I don’t mean to generalize in so particular a way, but there it is. And I couldn’t understand it, you know, for the longest time after I got here, because I don’t have the particle myself. Also, they are forthcoming—maybe too much so. Just my opinion.

  * * *

  You know how you can tell the tourists and the new arrivals? It’s not the athletic wear or the red or yellow windbreakers, or that they’re standing in groups looking up at the buildings. You can see they’re full of romance and big ideas, unfeasibility being a thing they don’t register. It’s like a dog whistle, and the ones who were born here can hear it. So that’s how the city folk are practical: absence of romance, and ability to detect the high-pitched squeal of the unviable.

  * * *

  You know Martin Heidegger? He talked about the uncanny and said that anxiety could happen anytime, that you don’t need the dark to feel worried. I try to stick where the pigeons are, myself, because I don’t think they have much anxiety. I’m not sure they even really mind it when they get taken off by a raptor. They’re very moment to moment, far as I can tell.

  * * *

  The place where I grew up was full of anxieties. I once had a woman serve me lemonade on her porch and inform me I was the devil. I said I wondered that she served me lemonade then, and she just smiled at me, which made me question the state of the lemonade. But I didn’t want to turn away a drink offered to me by a neighbour. It turns out it was bitter, and that’s all it was. The man who became my husband was from the same place, but the other end. Different anxieties, but anxieties all the same. He was so tall and thin, it almost made me laugh when I first saw him. I was working in a restaurant when he came in the door. He had a dog tied up outside, and the dog howled the whole time he was in the restaurant, eating his meal, not especially slowly but not fast, either, which should have told me something. In those days there was one thing I wanted, which was obligations. When you’re young you want to belong to something. He was a reader, and it ended up getting into me, and I started to read all the time, too, just so we’d have discussions. But we didn’t really. Had three children, though, soon enough, and you know what having three children does? Puts a dent in your reading.

  Molly

  Consider the designation: orphan. Almost a title, and royal. A little like organ, an essential one. I figured he knew things that other people couldn’t possibly. I kept my seizures from him but knew he had an understanding of this other, perhaps more fundamental, presence—or absence—inside me. We had both lost our parents at a young age, both carried molecular gaps and blanks in our cells, and this was the foundation. Therefore we were twins of a sort, with our own heart gibberish. Like Stella and Augustin, we were at one time similarly wired. The communication was such that we didn’t need to speak. Or that was how I interpreted the silences.

  * * *

  “If you want me again look for me under your boot soles,” Whitman said. People are unimaginative where they look. The surface is not as solid as it seems. I don’t know why we haunt each other. Tucked into the city, or maybe far beyond it, he could be anywhere, or everywhere.

  * * *

  Once, I parted a rack of sweaters in a clothing store to find him in the space on the other side. I had been thinking of him so hard that he materialized in a Park Slope boutique. But it was a stranger who grinned at me, and I left. I hustled along the street with my coat shut tight around my chest and my head down. Then he was in front of me: Seth, the real one, with his hands on my arms, pushing back. His face like a lion’s. We didn’t say anything, because there was nothing to say. And the dance began again.

  * * *

  I crossed town in a cab one night, pinning down in a notebook open on my lap some ideas for a new piece. The movement toward him, the stop and start. The driver had an urgency that didn’t belong to me yet. His long fingers smacked the steering wheel every block, and outside the car night had come. It was as serene as it ever gets. He honked at cars and people, even traffic lights. The cars and people and lights kept on; they were held in a pressure of their own. A cyclist went by on the left, the driver honked, and the cyclist was gone, vapourized. More stopping and starting, and puffs of steam and exhaust. I pictured Seth in his apartment, only one or two lamps on because he liked it dim unless he was sorting his climbing gear. He drank coffee regardless of the hour. I had seen him grind beans at 1:00 a.m., and he often served me a cup on nights like this, so I pictured him in the darkened kitchen
working by candlelight, rooting for clean mugs. He would open the door to find me inches away. A wordless, primitive impact.

  The cab moved toward him with me in it, and my voice sounded like a stranger’s when I hissed at the driver, “Just get us the fuck there.”

  Plastic Dolls

  I sat at the bar with a glass of sparkling water and Seth stood behind it, arms stretched out and hands resting on the edge so that he leaned a little forward. The place was called Hammerhead, where punk and alt-rock bands came to play, but on this Monday night, it was quiet and dark with strings of lit red plastic chilis where the bottles were lined up. Someone had nailed naked plastic dolls down a post that went through the bar top, the bottom one of which would pee into a dish marked FIDO if you gave it a bottle. There were a few bowls of nuts and pretzels that Seth had already suggested I avoid. As I sat on the stool, I felt the sort of energy that makes sense of senseless things and forms the spine of bad decisions, rash moves, benders, and obsessions. I had quietly left the apartment of the person I was seeing to plant myself in front of Seth, who had taken me to dinner two nights before. The logic was held and nurtured entirely by the body, and the hope of consuming and being consumed. He filled my glass and had been listening to me talk about the company I was hoping to form.

  “Undoubtedly you should do it. You were made for it.”

  “Don’t know yet,” I said. But I did know. I was still protecting the idea. I was aware of a chill in my spine, excitement and dread. The bar underneath my elbows was inert and solid, then unstable. I felt the formation of those endless binaries: trust or not trust. I watched his hands as if I’d never seen fingertips and veins before, the ends of the nails. Inexplicable, raging lust.

  * * *

  A man at the bar asked, “What’s the meaning of life?” to which Seth said, “Why do you ask?”

  The man said, “Aren’t you supposed to know?”

  “Ask her,” Seth said, pointing at me. “She looks like she knows, doesn’t she?”

  The man turned to me. He was dressed head to toe in navy, as if he would deliver something or fix it. He was thin and his face heavily lined. “Well? What sayest thou?”

  “Make things,” I said.

  He waved his hand. “That’s the purpose. What’s the meaning?”

  “Fine. The meaning,” I said. “There’s a structure in the inner ear called the cochlea.”

  “So?”

  “It’s shaped like a snail.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That’s the meaning.”

  The man looked into his scotch, blinking. This went on for some time. Finally, he said, “Whoa.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  Seth poured somebody a beer. “I think I’ve just been enlightened, but I’m not sure how.”

  “You’ll get over it,” I said. I had the thought, By the time we’re through with each other, we’ll question our very existence, but this didn’t seem incompatible with anything, or even much of a warning. The body had made its decision and sat on the barstool with rapt attention. There was nothing to be done.

  * * *

  Eventually the man was gone. Seth polished a glass repeatedly. “Why didn’t we sleep together the other night?” he said.

  “Not everyone has sex on the first go.” I smoothed my hands in my lap primly.

  He smiled. “Oh, c’mon. Neither of us is sexually reticent …”

  I laughed. “Sexually reticent. I haven’t heard that phrase before. Okay, sure.” I shrugged. “You’re right about that, I guess. Or I’ll speak for myself and say that’s generally true.”

  “So why?”

  “I can ask you the same.”

  He put the glass down and leaned into the bar. “All right. Fair enough.”

  “This is a negotiation,” I said.

  “It does seem that way.”

  “Are you intimidated?”

  “I don’t get intimidated,” he said.

  “Liar.”

  He smiled. “No, it’s true. You don’t intimidate me. You intrigue me. I like you. I like your mind. I’ve seen your work, remember, which is a bit like walking around inside your head. Your fantastically weird head.”

  “The term weird has no place in seduction, you should know.”

  “Noted. Fantastically inventive mind. Brilliant, in fact. And I’m not just saying that to get into your pants. But if it will help things along, I’ll repeat it.”

  I had been taking a swallow of water and almost choked on it. “Cad. That’s forward. Doesn’t begin to answer the question, though.”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. “Here’s the problem. Whatever I say, however I approach this, I feel kind of like an idiot.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m not sentimental.”

  I scoffed. “Oh god, me either.”

  “I don’t wax poetic.”

  “We can work on that.”

  “So if this sounds stupid …”

  “Shoot.”

  He took a breath. “I want to savour you,” he said. He looked down and wiped his hand over his face. “God, that’s fucking—”

  “No, no.” I patted my cheeks. “Wow, I’m blushing. I don’t blush. Generally speaking.”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “No. It’s perfect,” I said. “I can say the same. That’s the reason, right there.”

  He watched me for a moment. “Say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “What I said. I want to hear it.”

  I laughed. “Pardon?”

  “Yeah. I want to hear that. I just put myself out there …”

  I rolled my eyes. “I want to savour you.”

  “This time with feeling.” He smiled.

  “Give me your hand.” I had a mocking expression on my face, but when he placed his hand in mine, I felt suddenly stricken. “Are the babies watching us?”

  He glanced at the pole. “Yes. Yes, they are. Make this good.”

  I sighed. “Except that I have to ask you about something first.”

  He appeared disappointed.

  “The other night, Sabine at the party.” I tried to find some coherence. “She was drunk—really drunk, actually. I don’t know how it started or why she said it. But she said that your parents died a long time ago.” I veered into arid and dangerous territory, one entirely unconducive to foreplay. I couldn’t resist the pull of that place, however. “I don’t mean to be heavy … No. That’s not right. I mean to be heavy. I’m asking because I lost my parents when I was twelve.”

  A change began to happen in his face.

  “Are your parents alive?” I said.

  A long silence followed in which he appeared to be making a decision. “No.” He shook his head. “No, they’re not.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  I allowed that to sink in. Eighteen was close enough. And it meant that Sabine was roughly thirteen or so when the accident happened. I had never come across other tribe members, never stumbled across another who had lost both parents during childhood in all the people I had met in thirty years. But I had found him, and his sister, and we were at the beginning of something, or the edge of it. “How?”

  “Private airplane.” His expression was the same as at the party. “Mountain.” He moved my glass out of the way and held both my hands. “You?”

  “Fire. I was at a friend’s house.” And there it was. A monstrous shadow passing over, as eerie as an eclipse, and all the people turned to ghosts. My heart pounded, and my brain hurt with the incompatible arrangement of commiseration and desire with an implacable grief. But the orphans couldn’t kill the libidinous nature of the transaction, and not ten minutes later, he had arranged for someone else to fill his shift. We left the bar to go to his apartment, arm in arm, unable to prevent the force of our collision. I said, as we were walking along and I didn’t have to face him, and even if I thought the phrasing insipid, “I want to savour you.” He seemed ple
ased enough.

  Thighs

  It is possible to hold someone between your thighs who nevertheless inspires some distrust, or disdain, or distance. I straddled Seth’s back and traced letters, perhaps maps, on the skin and its tattoos. We had been seeing each other for six months.

  * * *

  It is possible to smell bourbon from the very skin of another person, emanating from the cells, from the human between your thighs.

  * * *

  It is possible to wish for love to remain unspoken, unknown. Quiet in its corner.

  * * *

  It is possible to know someone, the one between your thighs, and not know them. It is also possible that they will not know you but believe they do. It is possible to hear the words I know you better than you know yourself.

  * * *

  Bollocks.

  * * *

  He said, “I love you,” into the pillow, as if ingesting, as if eating it. A fritz in my brain, a short circuit. Language came to me as roots and branches, but broken ones, and storm sodden. I couldn’t locate myself on the map of his back where I had been tracing whatever plans I had, or thoughts, or something unsayable. I felt the man between my thighs, saying the words I didn’t want to hear, the ones I couldn’t abide. Fuck you, I thought. Do not disturb.