by Dylan Hicks
“Isn’t that just red-red?” I said.
She shrugged.
“What if Maryanne sees and recognizes me when I’m looking out for her?”
“Just tell her you’re waiting on a friend,” Wanda said, and we both laughed.
“Will she be wearing that snowsuit?” I asked.
“No, no. She just wore that as a joke. Probably she’ll be wearing her red leather jacket.”
“Okay, I think I know the one you mean.”
“It has a belt, kind of Shaft-y.”
“Right, yeah, I’ve seen it.”
I had the next day off and could discharge the plan straightaway. That morning Wanda furtively slipped me the cash on our way out of the bank (the furtiveness was just for fun, I guess), and ran to catch her bus. After lunch I went to a drugstore and found a greeting-card envelope in stop-sign red. The card itself was for an occasion not pertinent to my life, so I left it on a park bench for someone else, using a rock as a paperweight. I wrote “Razor Ray” on the envelope in block letters with my less serviceable left hand, twice underlining the name:
The epithet was Wanda’s idea as well, an attempt to discourage pangs of conscience from Maryanne, something of a softy. Too farcical a touch, I argued (I’ve just noted my antipathy for the form), but, farcical or not, one that might scare Maryanne into simply leaving the money alone, or make her doubly inclined to turn it into the police. But I didn’t protest for long. At that point I saw my function as strictly executive, understood that Wanda, in addition to helping out a friend, was trying to produce and direct a piece of street theater, and that my job was to help realize her vision.
I got to the basket-handle footbridge in time to unobstruct a gap between two of its planks with a letter opener. The bridge passed over a creek or brook that branched off Loring Lake. The lake probably wasn’t safe to stand on yet, but the brook, creek, or branch seemed solid under the snow. I hung a stick from the gap (the snow held it in place) so I wouldn’t lose track of the spot, then waited on the brook- or branch-bank, peering through the railing, my galoshes filling with snow. I only had to wait about twenty minutes for Maryanne to approach. Unfortunately, a man or tall boy in a baseball cap was walking maybe thirty paces behind her. No one, as far as I know, saw me scurry back under the footbridge, clutching the creased, damp envelope. Maryanne’s footfalls crunched charmingly overhead.
On my next afternoon off (probably three days later), Maryanne was unfollowed on the path leading to the footbridge, but was with a friend—Wanda in her grandfather’s old camel coat, it seemed from a distance, though that didn’t make sense, and as they got closer I saw that it was the similarly statured Wade in a coat I’d not seen before, a shearling coat that he later said he’d been keeping in his pillowcase. I was taken aback to see Wade and Maryanne together and couldn’t react in time to remove the envelope, which, as it happened, they walked right past. Perhaps they’d instead looked up to admire a flock of blackbirds or a snow-covered linden branch, or were too engrossed in conversation. I eavesdropped hungrily as they approached, crossed, and passed the bridge, but only caught a few unrevealing sentences. Maryanne, it seemed, was asking the supposedly polyglot Wade if other languages had a better word to represent the sound of a sneeze than ahchoo, or if the word is pretty much the same across languages, since ahchoo is about perfect, though only for one type of sneeze—or maybe, Wade broke in, once the word ahchoo and its variants were introduced, people unwittingly began to steer the sound of their sneezes to conform to the word, a tail-wags-the-dog thing, like when … and then their voices got too faint.
Four days later—Maryanne’s desperation all the more pronounced, overdue notices sliding daily under her door in increasingly perturbed script, her phone soon to be muzzled—I, holding my breath, heard her stop, heard the crinkle of her thigh-length red leather jacket when she leaned over to pick up the bulging stop-sign-red envelope, may have heard one of the belt’s arrowheads graze the packed snow. My heart was pounding even faster than it had during my previous lurkings under the bridge. When Maryanne got the gist of the envelope’s contents, she must have stood still and looked in all directions, because it took her awhile to start walking again, at what sounded like a faster pace than before. I stayed put for a half minute, then slowly emerged from under the bridge. The envelope was still there. She’d taken the money but left the envelope, I thought, but no, it was all there. I next tried with an unmarked envelope (Wanda had yielded to my point re Razor Ray). This time, as far as I could hear, Maryanne didn’t even slow down, nor did she ever mention the strangely enduring/recurring envelope to Wanda, though they certainly talked often enough about less interesting things.
On the afternoon of that fourth unsuccessful attempt to solve Maryanne’s financial trouble, I was in an unpleasant mood, a kind of tired agitation mixed with horniness. That night I told Wanda that after Maryanne had again passed over the money, I’d emerged from the bridge to see a man leaning over to pick up the envelope, an apparently homeless man whom I hadn’t noticed before. There was nothing I could do, I told Wanda; I couldn’t reasonably explain to the man that the money had been entrusted to me, couldn’t tussle for it in good conscience. Wanda of course was dejected by this, regretted having turned a simple kindness into an entertainment. “I’m so fucking selfish,” she said, and cried. When she finished, we sat in defeated, roiling silence for five minutes or so. Finally she blew her nose again (I’d brought her a roll of toilet paper). “At least the money went to someone in need,” she said.
That night I lay in bed thinking about how to give the money back to Wanda, but couldn’t come up with a way to confess that wouldn’t end our relationship, an especially pusillanimous concern seeing as how our relationship was already in a clear lame-duck period. I spent just as much time imagining how I’d spend the money, and didn’t shake these latter thoughts or even feel the need to eat till nearly a full day later, about five minutes after I’d come pathetically on the heavier prostitute’s back, on which there was a disturbing welt.
Now I’m thinking of part of a poem by Gary Snyder, whom both Wade and my mother Marleen read in the seventies:
I don’t mind living this way
Green hills the long blue beach
But sometimes sleeping in the open
I think back when I had you.
The brook or branch that runs under that footbridge in Loring Park seems to run down the above passage, which describes how I feel today, though there’s no long beach here and the you I miss is plural, the y’all form. Here, in fact, is Loring Park itself. There’s a flower garden nearby, full of bumblebees and helpful identifying signs. I’m trying to build my floral knowledge, but I can feel the names slipping away like a dream even as I mumble them to myself. I’m writing on a park bench. That makes me sound like a vandal—I mean I’m writing in a yellow notebook while sitting on a park bench. I’m also eating a package of oily sliced ham and a stringy, arid orange, eating hastily though not like the caffeinated wolf I was on the night described in short just above, when I ate two slices of heat-lamp pizza on the bus ride home from the thinner prostitute’s humble but not seedy apartment. I see that the wooden footbridge has been replaced with one of concrete and steel, a less attractive bridge, though the steel railing has already taken on a handsome patina that makes it look considerably older than its no-more-than eighteen years. Under the bridge now are some clothes, the upended lid of a Weber grill, a sleeping bag, some bottles, some other things, not my things (there but for the grace …), though just now the idea isn’t emphatically unimaginable, is even perversely attractive.
Blue Nude
ONE LATE AFTERNOON ABOUT A WEEK AFTER THE envelope interlude, Wade, Maryanne, and I were on the living room couch surrounded by five or six collections of erotic art (“porno art” in Wade’s constant designation), having just returned from the U of M’s main library, where Wanda had stayed behind in the video room to take notes on episodes of Your Show of Shows. Using
a TV tray as a desk, I was slowly annotating a stack of Wanda’s promotional postcards with the words “I go on at 8,” but would frequently look up from my work to watch Wade and Maryanne discuss ideas for her erotic-art term paper, he playing the questionably solicitous blue-jeaned professor at some undistinguished college. He shared his incompletely coherent ideas about George Grosz’s desolate bacchanals and Otto Dix’s S&M watercolors, took Erotische Kunst, Gestern und Heute from her lap so he could better spot favorite features of a skimpily reproduced Egon Schiele nude or point out a detail in one of Eric Gill’s woodcut romps, picked up another book and explicated Achille Devéria’s fantastically explicit depictions of orgies, voyeurism, and bestiality. He kept flipping pages, switching books. As a rule he drew the “long sensual line” at adolescent nudes, he told Maryanne, and opposed academic porno art; thus Ingres’s The Source was his quintessential guilty pleasure (Cabanel’s similarly tacky and arousing The Birth of Venus, with the goddess’s right eye open a classically pornographic sliver, was another). Perhaps to evidence his bisexuality, of which he seemed proud, he praised the “glistening carnality” of William Etty’s The Wrestlers, but he seemed more sincerely aroused by Philip Wilson Steer’s Seated Nude: The Black Hat. The pornodelic fantasies of Ernst Fuchs and Mati Klarwein, he said, were “exalted kitsch.” He was a big fan of Degas’s rainy, snapshot bathers, and of Goya’s The Naked Maja, Manet’s Olympia, Bonnard’s Blue Nude, and Frenhofer’s Study No. 3; all were “impossibly sad.” He was more attracted to the kneeling background maid in Titian’s The Venus of Urbino than to the Venus herself. He’d once had a postcard, he said, of the Félicien Rops aquatint in which a zaftig, blindfolded brunette, naked save for stockings, gloves, ribbons, flowers, bows, and other accessories, walks a pig under cherubic oversight. He liked shunga, but only from a distance, he said, because he wasn’t “into Oriental women.” (“That’s kind of lame,” Maryanne said.)
A moment later Wade turned a page, and I could hardly believe Courbet’s The Origin of the World, a close-up of a woman’s nude torso, the subject-object lying in bed with her left leg spread, her right angled slightly out. “Jesus, when was this painted?” I said.
“Eighteen sixty-seven,” Wade said. (Sixty-six, in fact.) We all stared at the reproduction awhile. The painting’s vantage is from the foot of the bed. A sheet covers part of the model’s left breast and all her head, most of which latter part would be above the painting’s top edge anyway, though if not for the sheet her neck and chin would probably be exposed. The sheet and the painting’s limiting focus keep the model’s arms out of view as well. It seemed odd to me that her right arm wasn’t even suggested, and the more I looked at the painting that afternoon (my memory now assisted by the several reproductions I have laid out in front of me this afternoon), the more the model seemed to be an amputee, partially unlimbed just as the bed is unlimned—it’s really not a bed at all but a kind of magic sheet floating in a dark brown inane, a dark brown nearly matching the model’s pubic hair.
“It’s just like a centerfold,” Maryanne said.
“Except a centerfold’s almost always a full-body shot,” I said.
“Well it may actually be a conflation of Courbet’s model—who was probably this gorgeous red-haired Irishwoman named Hiffernan—a conflation of her and one of the porno photos floating around Paris back then,” Wade said.
“It doesn’t seem like she has red hair,” I said, looking at the pubic hair.
“Yeah, but you have to remember that le réalisme wasn’t a fussbudget documentarian’s fidelity to prosaic reality but a prophet’s allegiance to essential truth,” Wade said.
“My dad has brown hair but a red beard,” Maryanne said.
“Besides, this is a bad reproduction,” Wade said, “though generational loss can of course be a source of great interest. Years ago—I never should have sold it—but years ago I owned the book that featured the first mass-repro of L’origine du monde, this wonderfully designed French book from the late sixties called Le sexe de la femme.”
I thought for a moment.
“It was by a doctor, maybe a friend of a Lacan’s, since Lacan owned L’origine for a long time—how perfect is that?—and maybe through him this doctor managed to get a photo, or it might have been that—”
“Wait,” I said. “Le sexe de la femme.”
Wade corrected my pronunciation.
“My mom owned that book too. She got it from a boyfriend when she was in Paris.”
“Really?” Wade said blankly, turning the page.
“Yeah.”
“That’s weird,” Maryanne said.
“Not so weird,” Wade said. “It was quite a hot book back then.”
“For Americans, though?” I said. “It doesn’t seem like a lot of Americans would—”
“No, it was definitely part of the hippie samizdat,” Wade said.
“She always told me that my other mom, you know, that my other mom stole it from her.”
“You have two moms?” Maryanne said.
“I’m adopted.”
“Well, I bought the book secondhand in Enswell,” Wade said. “Maybe I bought your other mom’s copy without knowing it.”
“Yeah”—I spoke slowly—“that’s probably it. She probably sold it to buy drugs.”
“Maybe,” Wade said quietly.
I craned my neck and leaned around Wade to look at Maryanne. “My real mom OD’d,” I said. I wanted her to come over and comfort me, but it was Wade who put his hand lightly and awkwardly on my back. After a too-brief pause he started recommending additional sources for Maryanne’s paper, which if I’m remembering correctly she never got around to writing.
Wild Things Run Fast
ON A FEW HOT NIGHTS DURING THE SUMMER OF ’78, Wade and my mother slept in his cool basement apartment, and I moved into her queen-sized bed. (The heat has never kept me awake; my contented slumber through “oppressive” heat and humidity has bred envy.) On those nights when Wade and my mother slept in the basement, I would stay up late in my mother’s bed reading boy-detective stories, or so I once told Wanda, who I thought would like to picture me reading such stories on the same summer nights that found her under soft bedcovers aiming a flashlight at Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, or Story of O. (Wanda was always a more sophisticated reader than I, as well as sexually precocious, but you’ll recall that she’s five years my senior, this last difference most accounting for the contrast in our summer-of-’78 reading.) I did sometimes read boy-detective stories, but rarely, and I don’t recall reading any on those nights when Wade and Marleen slept in the basement. Probably by the time Wanda was fully enraptured by her book, even stroking her flashlight as she read, her mouth slightly open, the light- and world-blocking covers too warm for summer (though Wanda’s family had central air), probably by that time I was well into my night’s first boring dream.
Wade generally kept the plywood door to his apartment unlocked, so I sometimes went down there to watch his fish or listen to his stereo. His speakers, Frankenstein creations made by his drumming friend Karl Tobreste, were the size of cigarette vending machines. They stood on the obligatory maroon shag, pointing toward his bed from opposite sides of his sleeping area (much of the sound got lost in the dust under his never-hidden-away hideaway). A nude by an Enswell photorealist named Lloyd Gibson hung across from the bed, above the speaker-flanked modular storage unit of bricks and boards, which held some of Wade’s books, his favorite records, his stereo, some knickknacks, objets d’art, and mementoes: an ashy incense holder; a series of misshapen, variously eaten ceramic doughnuts made by a clever but clumsy niece (these doughnuts especially rattled at certain woofer eructations); a framed photo of his grandfather wrestling a bear; a broken Philco radio. Gibson’s painting—which owing to the shelves was hung too high, so that it nearly touched the low ceiling—profiled an erotically fleshy woman with brick-red hair, wearing Ray Bans and a Milwaukee Brewers cap, getting out of a pink bathtub, water cascading fr
om her liquory backside and dripping from two fangs of pubic hair. I also have some recollection of the painting’s fogged mirror and the grime on the tile grout, but I might have added those details later. A few times I lay on Wade’s hideaway for a long while staring at Sharon Gibson (the model, though it was hard to tell with the cap and sunglasses, was Lloyd’s wife, the night manager at Piggly Wiggly and an acquaintance of my mother’s), listening mainly to Manilow and Manchester, sometimes to Seger or Sands. The mattress had a magnetic indentation in its center. I wish I could remember what speculative, protosexual thoughts I had during those whiles, though having wished this I feel I’ve abused myself.
My mother Marleen rented that house in Enswell for nine years. She was always a homebody but never bought a home, though after both her parents were dead, she took over their modest, paid-off ranch house, an arrangement my more affluent aunt accepted but resented. The inheritance from my grandparents wasn’t large, I gather, but wasn’t insignificant. My adoptive grandfather, an engineer for a company that made circuit breakers and other electric-power equipment, earned decent money but was something of a spendthrift. Anyway, the house in Enswell was a boxy two-bedroom with two front windows, pale gray asbestos siding, and a tiny wooden stoop that my mother called a deck. It was on Queal Street just off Foster Avenue, near where Queal’s westernmost yellow center dash pointed across Foster to the front door of Oran’s Bar. To our immediate west was the aforementioned parking lot of a large Lutheran church, whose chestnut bricks looked more red than brown in the sun, and whose spire sometimes cast a shadow on those entering Oran’s in the arguably not-late-enough afternoon. During the warmer months of the school year, I’d routinely spend a few afternoon hours in the lot, popping my anemic wheelies, jumping off curb ramps, trying to avoid parked cars as narrowly as possible, drawing invisible zeroes, ampersands, eyeballs, and apples with my tires (if there were puddles on the lot, I could make these shapes visible, but then they weren’t quite the shapes I had in mind). On some summer days, I biked around the lot all day, sometimes found the repetitive tricks and near-tricks transporting. Around six o’clock, my mother would open the back screen door and call out: “Hot dogs!” “Burgers!” “Taco salad!” “D-Luxe Frenchies!” “Tuna casserole!” In the summer we ate on the railed, wooden front stoop almost every night, listening to the v-eights and eight tracks whizzing by on Foster, our plates in our laps, our metal folding chairs (hers silver, mine in the standard dun) facing the largely uneventful street but slanted slightly toward each other.
