Bereavements

by Richard Lortz

  So apparently he was doing, and doing well, the peculiar and mysterious thing she had asked be done: sharing. . . (how had she put it?) . . . sharing each other, each other’s be-ing and presence.

  Yet . . . ?

  Well, he did feel better. The tightness had left his chest; his breathing was regular if shallow, his body weak, quite tired from the strain of the afternoon, but relaxed.

  Yet . . . ?

  She looked so strange!—having acquired a pallor that seemed a luminescent glow in the twilight.

  And something else disturbed him. He was beginning to feel faint. And faintly suffocated. He wasn’t breathing quite the way he ought to, after all. The room was airless. Or there were too many flowers. He looked around, counting four vases.

  Or maybe it was her perfume. Could it be that? There was something strong in the room: sweet and overpowering, like honey.

  Book III

  THAT FEARSOME, most intolerable of all times—the one she had learned to dread no matter what the circumstances—had finally arrived: goodbye, the small dying, the little death, with a dichotomy that split Mrs. Evans exactly in two: she had to endure the paradox of profound relief that Angel was leaving (the day had been exhausting) and the equally profound desire to keep him—never, ever (if that were possible) to let him go.

  The paradox was multiple, complex, for a whole hemisphere of her being told her that it hadn’t worked, wouldn’t do; the common denominator of their mutual loss (though he hadn’t really talked about his mother’s death at all) had been sufficient to bring them together, but, she was sure, would prove too weak to sustain them. This—while all the other continents, seas, islands of self demanded he be kept, cherished, possessed, owned, like the rarest of treasures, locked up in the safe behind Jamie’s painting along with the grimy postcard that had brought them together in the first place.

  She had Cook wrap the remaining cookies (a good two dozen) in wax paper and aluminum foil. This went into a brown paper bag which then seemed hideously common, too vulgar and depressing to carry through the streets, even at night, so she had Rose hunt through the hall closet for something more suitable. The girl found a small shopping bag, which was pretty, and blue, and had originally come from Tiffany’s with something or other.

  So equipped and supplied, Angel stood on the top steps by the open front door with a weak, broken-toothed smile on his slightly puzzled and wondering face—half grimace, really, trismic and fixed.

  Below, Dori waited, the back door of the car open, and Angel knew that while they were driving “home”—returning to the church—he would remain in the rear seat, not wanting to move up front, and that he and the chauffeur wouldn’t speak at all.

  He knew this just as he knew that Mrs. Evans was having some kind of—not unimaginable—trouble saying goodbye. Her attitude, her manner, was one of doubt, pain, delay and perplexity, as if there was something else, something very important she should remember to give him. Not only cookies, but . . .

  What are the countless amenities of parting? The “good riddance” one can never quite say? “So long? Nice meeting you? See you soon? Let’s get together again?” And, most heartbreaking of all: “Why not call me?—sometime”—that death-wish, tell-all fragment of a pause separating the “me” from the “sometime.”

  She had the feeling he was holding his breath as he stood there patiently if vaguely lost, confused, Tiffany-bag in hand, and the hand unconsciously held to his chest, two wide, black Spanish eyes fully on hers.

  And Angel inside?

  Had he passed the “test”? Had he fooled her good enough? Did she want him as his mother never had? Was he something of value, however small, however slight? Or was he now to be thrown away, tossed out into the street like the worthless refuse he was?

  The light from the streetlamp caught the wet edge of his broken tooth, making it the blink of a star, a signal from another planet so distant in space that the sender was dead eons ago, and vast civilizations, one following another, had fallen in ruins, become featureless rubble amid drifting clouds of final, eternal dust.

  She was down on her knees in the next moment, crushing him and the cookies between them in her arms, sobs welling up from a body shaking as uncontrollably as his chin when it had been seized by its shuddering tic.

  How impossible can behavior become? Dori had to come up the steps and in a pretended offhand way, separate them—or rather, contrive somehow to ease his hand between them, ostensibly to rescue the cookies from being crushed, but really to push Mrs. Evans away that she might regain sufficient control to let the boy go.

  This, she managed finally to do, but only after their next tryst had been arranged, fixed, certain: the day, the hour, the very minute when again they would meet.

  Seeing the pretty, blue Tiffany bag, Aurelio asked his son what the fuck was in it.

  “Nothing,” of course.

  But his father’s eyes were wickedly blood-shot, and Angel stared past him to the floor where the man, evidently bored with TV, had made a somewhat misshapen medieval “castle” with at least forty or more empty beer cans, most of them crushed flat or into various angles.

  Following his son’s gaze, Aurelio, with mixed pride and shame, told him: “this here’s the moat, see?”—running his hand around a circle of enclosed space. “And this here drops down, like so, f’t’make th’bridge.”

  Not only no praise, no comment.

  “Y’don’ like it?!” Hurt, wide-eyed surprise.

  “It’s okay.” And because Angel quickly realized “okay” was insufficient—”it’s nice”—nice, of course, for a retarded six-year-old, not a big, hulking, bleary-eyed, beer-soaked, handsome, hairy ape of a man.

  “I gotta piss,” the ape said, a broad hand flat on his lower, too-full belly. “I gotta piss me a whole river”—stumbling out of sight. “You wanna watch?”

  Watch?! Angel could hear the blows of the hammer—or was it his heart—that nailed both feet to the floor.

  Aurelio’s aim, because he loved the sound, was always dead center, and from the open-doored bathroom, Angel heard a stereophonic hiss, splatter, drive: a deep, tumbling niagara. It was endless beer-piss, of course, ten million gallons of it, enough to float a ship or put out a three-alarm fire.

  Then: gurgle, gurgle—the broken-seated, paint-peeled toilet flushing all that prized, golden beauty away; Aurelio’s grunting pleasure of relief; snap!—the sound of the tight elastic band of the jockey underwear as it came up into place.

  And, from the excitement of it all—all that exuberant, healthy, good-bodied pissing—half a hardon, or at least a quarter, the man’s crotch swollen as he came back into the room.

  Angel could not more than glance at him, his heart already crowding his throat. He held up the Tiffany bag.

  “What it is,” he said, deciding to explain after all, “is some cookies. Chocolate chip. Really good.” He opened the aluminum foil and wax paper on the floor, revealing a mound of large brown fragments.

  “You want some?”

  “That shit!” Nevertheless, the man reached down for a handful, stuffed it into his mouth. “I din’ eat no supper. There ain’t a fuckin’ thing in the house worth eatin’. Nothin’ t’eat . . . Only Angel.” With a half-smirked, crooked, crumb-smeared grin: “One a’ these days I’m goin’ t’eat him.” And with the usual fake leer—”teach him how it’s done—in case he ever wants t’eat me.” Pause. “Jeeze!”—the delectable, butter-rich texture and flavor of the cookies turning the famished man on. “Where’d y’get ‘em?”

  “Oh . . . a friend.”

  “Some guy’s mother?”

  “Well . . . ” He did have his perverse, taunting side, wanting always, so often to shake up his father. “No. Just . . . a lady I know.”

  “A lady! What the fuck lady you know! You don’t know no lady!” But maybe he did. “Your teacher?—that Miss, Miss what’s-a-name?—Evans! Is that where you been?” Seizing him now, seizing the boy, which was exactly what th
e subliminal Angel was after, despite his believed and believable, raging, outraged, “Leggo!”

  “Cookies!” the man said. “More like ass, a piece of fancy, high-talkin’ ass! Am I right? You foolin’ aroun’ your age? Got y’finger into somthin’ nice?”

  But all this with more pleasure than anger or even interest, desiring only to taunt the boy as much as Angel did him. “Lemme see! Lemme smell that fuckin’ finger t’see where it’s been!”

  And now he had the boy’s arm in his, so twisted and anchored in an eveloping armor of hardened muscle that to move at all was to break it, while, laughing, and Angel too, though with pretended, exaggerated pain, the man literally sniffed at, half-nuzzled Angel’s hand.

  “I can’t tell,” he concluded, wet mouth searching. “Chocolate sure as shit, maybe perfume! Gotta taste!” and to Angel’s swooning horror and joy, the man was licking and sucking on his fingers, a joke like no other in the world, for fingers would never do. The man’s wild, irresistible mouth suddenly covered the boy’s, moved quickly to neck, shoulders—the clothes shredded from his body.

  A wet smothered heat against each small nipple, a tongue’s width of spit sliding down to the navel, then the crotch where, spewing already, Angel felt himself disappear, exploding under the pressure of an immense cavernous seizure.

  Rose appeared, quite suddenly, and without a sound, all but tiptoeing.

  Mrs. Evans glanced up from her vanity and, seeing the girl’s white face, supposed she must have been helping Cook with the baking—bread no doubt, which is sometimes messy, dusting herself with an accident of flour. Then she perceived that the color, or lack of it, was natural, or rather unnatural.

  “What on earth is the matter?” And without waiting for an answer, “Do you like these earrings? Or are they too much—with the pearls. They are! Oh! I can’t seem to do anything right today!” Now what is it? You seem determined to irritate me. I ask a question and you don’t reply.”

  “The young . . . man has arrived. Mr. Carlson-Wade.”

  Mrs. Evans stood. “Oh?” She dusted her shoulders, put the last touch of a comb to her hair. “Has he?” She picked up a bottle of perfume, considered, replaced it without use. “And from the look of you, I thought it might be Count Dracula. Where did you put him?”

  “Put him?”

  “Yes. It’s a question. In a language known as English.”

  “I didn’t put him anywhere. I mean . . . he sat himself down. In the hall. On a bench. Next to the umbrella rack. So I left him there.”

  Mrs. Evans had taken a valium or two. Or maybe not. Rose couldn’t decide. The woman was such an actress, determined to play out her moods, that it was difficult to know whether chemistry or the theatre was the order of the day. Frequently, it was both, and probably was so now—quite as if the lights had darkened and the curtain gone up.

  The woman gave a half turn, glanced at herself in the vanity, and then looked gravely at the girl.

  “Rose.” A lovely censorial gesture. “Wasn’t that a strange thing to do?”

  Determined not to be upstaged, the maid placed herself between Mrs. Evans and the mirror.

  “What, ma’am?”

  “Next to the umbrella stand. In the hall!”

  Rose decided to make the most of her few lines.

  “May I remind madam—” (she never used the word) “—that the elevator is stuck. Again. The door won’t bulge. So I couldn’t take him upstairs. And I didn’t know whether you’d want him in the living room or not.”

  “Not want him! But of course I want him! In the living room. Go! Instantly!”

  “But—”

  “No buts! None!”

  It wasn’t a curtain, or a blackout, but certainly an exit-cue—for Rose.

  The canny, or perhaps uncanny, girl hadn’t been wrong: two Valiums, ten milligrams each, really too much for the occasion as they were soon embarrassingly to prove, the blue chemical already at work soothing “nerves,” bringing back to normal both rapid breathing and beat of heart.

  With a last pained and still-doubtful look at herself in the mirror and another dab of perfume after all, Mrs. Evans descended the narrow corkscrew staircase, prepared as much as she ever would be, to face Bruno David Carlson-Wade who, she hoped, was not still sitting in the hall, where her entrance would be something less than appropriate.

  He wasn’t.

  Rose had evidently seen him into the living room, but when she opened the door, it was empty. No one! Bewildered, she was about to go, when she heard a slight false cough, a clearing of the throat. She turned back and, seeing the boy standing by the fireplace, realized the reason for her mistake. Her eyes had circled the room, more or less at eye level, expecting him surely—as short as he confessed to be—to be within sight, rising politely at the sound of the door.

  Actually, he was standing, but so much below eye-level that only a child of four, standing also and gazing straight ahead, could have found him. Because the boy was a dwarf, surely no taller than, good heavens! she hardly dared guess: three-feet-four? six?—no more: the smallest of creatures, handsome of face, truly handsome as he’d said, but with a body, under loose-fitting clothes, that must have been as broken, as gnarled as the dead twisted trunk of an ancient tree, one misshapen shoulder-blade extending so far behind him she was sure it was the crushed, ill-concealed wing of an adult angel.

  As worldly, as sophisticated, as old and experienced as she was, as wearily used to meeting an endless variety of people during her long and active life—beggar to king, even an audience with the Pope, not to mention the Padishah of Nef-Nebeezi who, before the first of her three husbands, wanted her as his thirty-second bride—she simply could not conceal the surprise and dismay that flash-froze her face, including tongue, lips, jaw and voice: all iced together so firmly her entire head must have been steaming like solid carbon-dioxide at the sight of this amazing little man—boy—for that’s what he was.

  Bruno David Carlson-Wade, on the other hand, was an expert at these meetings, having endured so often the shocked, glazed stare, the disbelief of strangers, that he got to the subject without delay.

  “If I had told you,” he said softly, barely smiling but smiling nonetheless, “you wouldn’t have invited me.” (She wouldn’t have.) “I must . . . do it this way, or never meet anyone at all—unless I explore every circus and freak show in town.”

  No reply. Ice still. A face drained of color (how well she now understood her flour-dusted Rose!), then, gradually, a flush of faint warm pink. But ah! that’s what was needed: blood, warmth, giving muscles strength to stretch a smile, first fake, then genuine, over a face now becoming alive with growing interest and curiosity.

  Finally, but in time—

  ”I’m sorry. But—knowing how it is, you must know how it is.”

  “Precisely.” —White, almost perfect teeth. “I do. Many times over. As monotonous but as tolerable as the sea: wave after wave crashing down on my head.” So he was showing off already, or perhaps a willing victim to his “novelist’s” taste. Well, there’d be nothing she couldn’t match.

  “And that’s why,” he continued, “I brought the petit fours, after all.”

  Mrs. Evans laughed, looking at a small lavender baker’s box on the rosewood table; then, turning to the house phone, she ordered tea.

  Again, like the first hour with Angel, though her purpose this time was different, the necessity was small talk, preliminaries, His schooling? High school, but nothing more; perhaps he’d go to a university later, Columbia or NYU, after his first book was published, but how much could college really mean to a writer?— disdainfully: mathematics! chemistry!-—though studies in Comparative Literature or The Novel might help.

  “Tell me about your extra, not-publishing-house-but-modeling career.”

  Well, he would hardly call it that; he did get jobs but not as often as he’d like. His head and hands (which were normal) were wonderfully photogenic (he’d been told), so he did hats of all kinds, wi
nter and summer, ski-goggles, sun-glasses, gloves, rings, even bracelets, now that men wore them—things like that.

  They then moved into the delicate and more sensitive area of his coming of age (if not size). Yes, his parents had been normal; in fact, oddly, his father six-feet-four, or so the vital statistics in the family bible recorded; he didn’t remember the man at all— only a few faded photographs.

  His mother? (Face pained, brooding but intensely alive) she’d been a saint: lovable and ostensibly loving. Ostensibly because (and this was hard to confess) he was convinced, probably preverbally, that she had never accepted him (in her heart): secretly, sorrowfully repelled and rejecting, not truly recognizing him as hers. “I’ve thought about that a lot. A dwarf can’t be a son. Axiom ex cathedra!” And he laughed, suppressing his anguish at his small, sad joke. “She was never, I don’t think ever, forgiving of God.”

  This Mrs. Evans could well understand, though she didn’t say so, of course. There could be no getting used to this bizarre little man (“man” because his head was full, adult size, belonging, like his father’s, to someone six-feet-four, though his beautiful face was lineless, the skin fresh and glowing, adolescent young, enormously appealing).

  But she also had the slight uncomfortable feeling, a nuance coldly damp (and it was never to leave her while he was alive, though now, at this moment, she planned never to see him again) that he was wearing a fabulous, life-real, perfectly-made, pretty-boy mask; better—an entire, hollow Shrove-Tuesday head that fitted entirely, if illy, over his own head which was never shown, never allowed to be seen.

  And under this, neck to toe, a marvelous, monstrous suit for a haunting on All Hallow’s Eve: a disguise so flawless he’d be welcomed on Bald Mountain or made choreographer extraordinaire of the corps de ballet for Danse Macabre.

  “Once,” Bruno said, “I saw an astonishing drawing; I’ve forgotten the artist, German, I think; was it Grosz? Well, nevermind. Exquisite, pen-and-ink as I recall, depicting quite simply, an immense, gnarled crocodile standing erect on its two hind legs, dancing—whirling madly—with a calm and graceful, beautifully smiling, lovely naked girl.”