In response to which Paul says “Bummer” or “Far out.” Depending.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Brandy sometimes snaps at him. “This is ancient history.” And a minute later she’ll read that steak is on sale at the Dominion store and mutter that she should pick up a couple of sirloins.
It seems that Brandy got into reading the newspaper about a year before Paul’s father died. “Hey, it’s her bag,” Paul says. “Keeps her spaced out.” He is prone to mentioning how spaced out she is, “what a spaced-out lady” eventually becoming his entire contribution to any conversation about her. From his admiring tone you’d think he was talking about her cherry pies. In Marcia’s opinion Brandy is more out of her mind than spaced out, but she lets it ride until Paul meets Joan and says about her that she is spaced out. Marcia goes rigid as sticks. “What do you mean by that?”
“Truly weird,” he says.
“What do you mean?” she says again.
“Living on the outside.”
“Joan doesn’t live on the outside. She never leaves the house.”
“I’m talking about where she’s at in her head, man.”
He puts his arm around her. She jerks away. “How would you know where she’s at?” she says.
“It’s right there.” Tapping under one eye. “You can see it.”
“What do you mean, you can see it!” High in her throat something flaps in a tight little circle. “Joan wears sunglasses! It was dark down there!”
“Not that dark.”
“What are you saying?” she cries. “That Joan is the same as Brandy?”
His face tries that on, likes it. “They both read stuff cover to cover. Right? You said Joan reads indexes, right?”
Marcia swallows.
“Copyright page to the end,” Paul says with relish. “That’s weird, man.”
It is, Marcia thinks for the first time. For the first time concerning Joan’s reading habits, that is. Otherwise it isn’t news to her that Joan is weird. That Joan might be a weirdo is the black-edged telegram. She wonders… and here they come, popping up like Indians on the horizon—Cedric Short, Ziggy’s dog, Ed’s uncle, Paul’s father, Brandy. That whole gang of weirdos. Gingerly, she dips Joan into the middle.
Immediately snatches her back out. Joan isn’t one of them! Is she? Is she? In her mind she holds a salt-shaker-sized Joan just above the babble, the lolling. She takes a breath and gives the group a closer look. Are they really so awful? Tuck in a few eyeballs, straighten up that head, pull up those pants. That’s it. That’s better. Feeling almost chipper now, she tells herself that even in so-called perfect families there are webbed feet and kleptomaniacs, perverted gerbils, some loony genius ancestor.
She thinks this but she can’t do it, she can’t not draw a line. “Well, there the resemblance ends,” she says to Paul.
“Right on,” Paul says. “Two spaced-out chicks.”
That he has laid eyes on Joan is an inaugural event. Of all Marcia’s friends only Pammy has met Joan, and that was only the one time. None of Marcia’s other boyfriends ever met her. Usually they weren’t even aware that she existed.
But with Paul, for the first year anyway, the ideal of no secrets is more of a drug to Marcia than drugs. She wants him to know everything about her and her family. With a kind of thirst she hauls out the photo albums. She opens underwear drawers, her own and Sonja’s. “Look!” she urges him. Always on her lips, not “love” as much as “look!” Look at her pimples, her fillings, her ear wax, the period blood on her underpants. He cranes to see. He says, “Wow.” In his bed she can just lie there like a starfish, limbs outflung. Up until him, lying naked on her back like that would have been unthinkable because of how it wipes out her breasts.
(She admits to herself that getting into position for an orgasm was tricky in the old days. And as for telling her old boyfriends what she wanted them to do to her, are you crazy? If she had smoked dope back then it might have been a different story. Give her a few tokes and she’ll ask for anything, say anything, there’s no shutting her up. Stoned, she is convinced that marijuana might even make Joan talk. Now is as good a time as any to mention how she tried to get Joan to take a puff. Joan accepted the joint, she rolled it between her fingers, sniffed it, but no way would she hold it to her lips. “Maybe when you’re a bit older,” Marcia said, finding herself relieved. Joan was only eleven, after all. When she was sixteen, seventeen, who knew? Because for all that Joan digs in her tiny heels, she can change her mind like that.)
About meeting Paul she changed her mind after a whole year of mooing “No.” Shutting herself in the closet and closing the door when he dropped by, despite loving the sound of his motorcycle—from far off, anyway. In fact, how Marcia knew that he was about to arrive, and arrive on his motorcycle rather than in his convertible, was that Joan would climb onto the desk and press her ear against the curtained window, and a minute later Marcia would hear the hum that could have been any motorcycle but never was and in another minute would be a roar in the driveway. By that time Joan would be back in the closet.
For a whole year Joan resists meeting the driver of that motorcycle and then, in seconds, she capitulates over a strand of his hair. It is wound round a button of Marcia’s yellow cardigan, which is hanging from the closet doorknob. On her way into the closet Joan spots the strand, stares at it, frees it. Glancing up from her homework and catching this meticulous extrication, Marcia says, “That must be Paul’s.”
Joan reads the length of the hair like ticker tape. She switches on the penlight that is attached to her visor and strokes it with the beam.
“There’s more where that came from,” Marcia says. The beam hits her in the left eye. “We could bring him around,” she says carefully, awning her eye with one hand. “We could feel how silky his whole head is.”
Joan clicks her tongue.
“Really?” Marcia says, quietly so as not to startle her into a moo. “We’re not kidding?” The beam holds steady. If Joan isn’t shaking her head neither is she nodding. “Tomorrow afternoon,” Marcia suggests in her softest voice. That is, she thinks it.
Nineteen
Most afternoons you’ll find Joan working at her editing bench down in what used to be the laundry room. The bench is a long, toddler-height table that Gordon constructed out of a door. The seat is a bar stool whose legs he amputated halfway up. He shaded the bulb and hung it from its wire about six inches above the bench, but a few weeks later, apparently because it got in her way, Joan had him remove it. By then she had purloined his high-powered penlight and fastened it with wads of masking tape to the brim of his green visor, the one he wore in the thirties when he was a proofreader. First, though, she cut and shortened the strap at the back and then sewed it together again using red thread and a perfect cross-stitch that Sonja said she hadn’t taught her.
Strange about Joan going to so much trouble over the light considering that she hardly ever turns it on. Upstairs she occasionally does, but downstairs, except for the odd times she refers to the manual Mr. Rayne mailed to her (fifty type-written pages) she sits in virtual darkness and tracks through the tapes. Listening, stopping, rewinding, listening, stopping. Since she wears earphones and has made it clear that the tapes are her private property, nobody could swear on a Bible as to what they contain, but even Marcia takes it for granted that it must be Joan playing the piano. Four years of playing for herself when she was alone. What else could be on them? It isn’t as though her old tape recorder was ever seen out of the closet more than once or twice. It isn’t as though she was capable of carrying the thing around. The family figures that what Joan did was open the closet, sit at the piano and record from across the room, and if that made for less than perfect quality it hardly matters now. Because they also figure that her aim is to pull the pieces apart, note by note, and rearrange the notes in some modern, dissonant collage inspired by the bizarre compositions of David Rayne.
Once Gordon finally appreciat
ed why Joan was so entranced by this Rayne character, his delicate heart (already swollen and leaping over Reverend Jack Bean) started booming in his ears like cannons. All gung-ho he consulted Rayne himself about the equipment she would need, about the nuts and bolts of sound editing. In Rayne’s swanky Rosedale home he listened to Rayne’s records which the old man conducted in the manner of someone trying to wave down a plane as he shouted over the music how his compositions were stories told in the language of pure, arbitrary sound.
“If you think of individual pitches as words,” Gordon later explained to Doris, “then, extrapolating from that, a series of pitches is a phrase. A series of phrases, or a tune, is a sentence. And so on. Do you see what I’m driving at? What Joan might be trying to do—and Rayne is with me on this—is come up with a really sophisticated way of communicating with us. A formal language!”
Such was his enthusiasm that he found a collector to buy his bedside table (which was a twenty-year-old, two-foot-high stack of correspondence between him and a has-been author who signed up with another publishing house and became hugely famous) and used the money to have the washer-dryer removed from the laundry room and hooked up under the cellar stairs. He sprang for shag carpet, black (Joan’s choice), and for the three top-of-the-line tape recorders that Rayne had recommended.
“Your heart!” Doris fretted.
He yelled, “To hell with my heart!” and carried the old door downstairs to build the editing bench. He hauled gallon paint cans. After blackening the walls and laundry tub, he suspended an oval mirror from the ceiling to hang between two of the editing machines at Joan’s eye level, then he affixed a reflective silver strip along the edge of the bench so that she wouldn’t bump into it. (As if she would!)
When Paul gets a load of the set-up—the shag, the dark, the mirror, the levitating silver band and the tiny creature in earphones and oversized cat’s-eye sunglasses, her white hair blooming barrettes and ribbons, her forehead beaming a white horn—he whispers, “Oh, wow,” in a reverential voice that, for Marcia, shrivels all his previous raptures.
They stand just inside the door, which was open. The instant Paul speaks, Joan spins around and whacks them with the beam.
“Joanie, this is Paul,” Marcia says softly.
Joan stops the tape, then mimics the sound of that. Nails him with her ray. Marcia nudges him to go closer, and he does, stooped over and on tiptoe, bellowing, “How are ya?” With the ray in his eyes he can’t see Joan flinch, but Marcia can and whispers, “Not so loud.”
“Do you mind turning that thing off?” Paul rasps. Click. Done. A second identical click is Joan’s fingernail tapping the earphone. Paul, always happy to join in, says click—“Click, click, click.” It is like the end of a movie … the tape clicking out, the house lights coming on, a grey powder wash whose source is the rec-room windows. “Groovy operation,” Paul says, bobbing his head in a half circle. Joan’s head tips. As Marcia knows, she is studying his hair. “Groovy dress,” Paul says.
It’s a white sleeveless sailor dress with a big square collar and a criss-cross of red string at the throat. “That used to be mine,” Marcia says. “When I was in kindergarten.”
“No kidding,” Paul says. Then, “Hey,” addressing Joan. “Why aren’t you humming?”
“She only hums in the closet,” Marcia hisses. This wasn’t a confidence but hearing him mention it, it sounds like one. “She wants to touch your hair,” she says, yanking his arm. “Crouch down.”
“I’m crouching, man.” He holds the edge of the table and sinks into a knee bend that brings him and Joan eye to eye. She tucks her stocking feet under the stool’s rung, the stool in the crux of his grasshopper thighs. “Help yourself,” he says, bowing his head. “Touch away.”
First she switches the penlight back on. Click. Click. Over his skull and shoulders the beam skims. Along his part it stops. A white wand there, balanced at a precarious tilt. Her arm, another white wand, she holds straight out and up in a Heil Hitler gesture, then lets it drift down until her hand touches his hair.
“Go ahead,” he tells her, “muss it up.” She draws strands between her fingers and studies them in the beam. She squishes her palm on the crown. “Yeah, dig in,” he says. She seems to consider it but changes to stroking. Slow, gentle. As if he’s a sleeping child, Marcia thinks. Then she thinks, a lover. Then, a dying man. His hair lies flat and has the grain of blond wood. Four times Joan caresses the length of it. “Feels great,” he says. Instantly she stops and switches off the light.
“All done?” he says. He looks up at her. Their faces are close together, hers half the size of his. Their breathing sounds like people on respirators. She leans even closer and starts sniffing. That scrutiny Marcia knows. To witness him under it, her face prickles. Pure wordless interest—telepathically that is all she is picking up.
Ten, fifteen seconds pass. When Joan suddenly twists around in the stool Paul drops backwards onto his hands.
“That was far out,” he says, standing up. “I was seeing doves and beautiful… oh wow, like, electric eyes.”
Joan turns on the tape recorder. It’s over.
“Let’s go,” Marcia says.
Paul raises one hand. “It was a trip,” he says to Joan’s back.
“Come on,” Marcia says, tugging his other hand.
“So, Joanie, can I come and see you again some time?”
“Leave us alone,” Marcia hisses.
“Huh?” He looks at her.
“Leave her alone, I mean.”
No, she doesn’t. She means “us.” In Joan’s treatment of Paul—complete absorption but only for as long as he was completely absorbing to her—Marcia has seen the blameless playing out of her own instincts. Now, pulling Paul from the room, she is seeing all the boys she has relinquished for monogamy, and a wind is blowing through her ribs.
And yet another three more months go by before she takes a bus to the Village and in front of the Old Folks’ Home (long-hairs floating by on the sidewalk, whitehairs flopped in wheelchairs on the lawn) picks up a muscle-bound boy named Lance. Eyes that zoom, reddish curls she slips the four fingers of one hand into and wears for a second like brass knuckles. They are stoned on his cigar-sized joints. He bounces on his toes. He is shorter than she is but only every half second. He talks fast. About the war in Vietnam, about revolution, Black power. He mimes pulling the pin from a grenade and lobbing it at a police car. “Pigs!” she calls out to impress him. His gaze whistles down her torso, lassos her hip-hugger jeans. He keeps patting his shirt pocket where the lump of a real grenade might be. Isn’t… as she learns at his parents’ mansion.
On the way there, on the bus, they drop a half-tab each of acid for the moon landing. She pretends it’s not her first trip. By the time they get off the bus she is a giantess holding the wee hand of a walking boy doll, and all the trees are upside-down females exposing their crotches. She and Lance go straight to the greenhouses, through the kitchen—where he grabs a jar of honey—and out the back door. It’s a jungle in there, flowers going off like fireworks, trees shooting up like fountains, alive vines, exotic smells she will call spikenard and saffard and calamus, shrieks she will assign to scandalized ladies before she sees the birds. He says, “Go like this,” and stretches her arms in the crucifixion pose. Her fingers brush fronds, giant green tongues. Her skin secretes crystal studs. For the symmetry and the thrill she stretches out her legs.
Stand like that and a boy might throw knives. Not this time, not him. He takes the lump out of his pocket, rips it open and sprinkles golden seeds from her shoulders to her wrists. Almost immediately aquamarine and peach-coloured birds drop onto the stamens her arms have become. The birds cling and peck like little lovers, tickling. But that’s nothing. Next he leads her to torch flowers, opens the jar and dabs the inside of his lips with the honey, and from out of nowhere three tiny helicopters appear. No, hummingbirds! They are hummingbirds! They are kissing him on the mouth.
“Okay, they�
��re revved up,” he says, twisting his head away from the next bird in line. With a finger huge as a zeppelin he dabs her lips. The hummingbirds buzz near her face like flies. “They dig your lipstick,” he says as the first tongue pokes into her mouth.
“Turn you on?” he says after the third bird.
It does. Why? Their tongues are just toothpicks. But it’s an incredibly erotic sensation. By the last bird she is pulsing her body into the thrusts.
When it’s all over he kisses her up on tiptoe. Their mouths glue together. She unzips his fly and his penis flips out, long as his legs, white as a root. On the concrete floor, on a bed of bird droppings, he pins her arms and churns up her insides. Then they go into the house and switch on a TV and watch spacemen bouncing on the moon.
Nobody can say that her first time fooling around on Paul was any old roll in the hay. Her second and third times are more along that line. These are with another boy after bird boy doesn’t return her phone calls. As far as she knows, neither boy has a weirdo at home, although who knows? Still, that seems to be the end of that phase. Along with her monogamy phase. And her no-secrets phase.
She doesn’t out and out lie, she just doesn’t tell Paul until he asks. By then, a month later, his refusal to see the clues strikes her as valiant since they must be hitting him right between the eyes. “Nowhere,” she answers when he wonders where she was last night. “Some guy downtown,” she explains her access to LSD. Her flesh is polka-dotted with hickeys and bruises, she reeks of smells she can’t be bothered to wash off—Brute aftershave, sex strong as bad breath.
What a sultry summer that is. It isn’t just her. Everybody seems to be drugged out, everybody’s an exhibitionist. Her mother tie-dyes T-shirts for the whole family, wears hers without a bra so what you have is a woman whose breasts go from her throat to her crotch. Her mother bleaches her hair platinum blonde. On Saturdays in the back yard she rubs suntan lotion on her friend Angela’s freckled thighs and back. She slips her fingers under the straps of Angela’s bikini. Under the waistband. Alone in the kitchen, she sings “You Give Me Fever,” and breaks out into a slow, twisty, snake-armed dance that makes Marcia scream with embarrassment. Her father grows sideburns and starts doing exercises in front of the TV before breakfast. Marcia would die before telling him that when he stride-jumps you can see the shape of his penis flapping under his pyjama bottoms. Her sister Sonja doesn’t seem to notice, goes on smiling at the card table across from him. Marcia wonders, does Sonja have any idea what a penis looks like? And yet even with Sonja there’s a moment that summer when if you didn’t know her you’d think she was sitting there having an orgasm. Marcia has just come home from work and she goes into the living room and Sonja is clipping her pins at full steam but she’s slid down the chair, she’s flushed and moaning and her eyelids are fluttering.
Mister Sandman Page 20
