by Dylan Hicks
I refused this invitation, which hadn’t really been made, and didn’t dwell on my refusal. Our Saturnalia was hugely sexual, but not hugely lustful; when the four of us laid out our blankets and coats and prepared mutely for sleep on the hard living-room floor, there was some touching and neck kissing but no significant removal of clothes, unless some were removed after I nodded off, and I doubt that anyone felt stupid, ashamed, regretful, or even hungover the next morning, when the phonograph stylus was perhaps still stuck in the slick limbo between the last band and the paper label, and was thumping like a heart all night, though I doubt that as well, since my turntable back then was a nearly inerrant retractor.
The Origin of the World (2)
ON THURSDAY, DECEMBER 19 OF 1991, I CAME HOME from the closing shift somewhere around ten thirty, carrying in each of my parka pockets a new CD for myself, though I still hadn’t done any Christmas shopping. None marked my entrance. Wade was probably making deals at the oversized corner bar. It was dark in the living room, dining room, and kitchen, but a lot of light was coming from the bedroom. Wanda didn’t answer when I called her name, but she was home, naked and asleep in bed, lying on her back, her left knee slightly bent, her right arm forming an L that finished above her head. I lingered a moment in the doorway.
How to characterize her condition? She seemed in a state of unconsciousness shallower than death but deeper than deep sleep; I could see her breathing, but it was like the breathing of a statue. The bedroom’s overhead light was on, its lopsided fixture basketing many dust-cushioned, capsized insects while frost-shading two white bulbs of Wanda’s preferred one hundred watts, hard glare-pears unchanged during Wade’s renovations. The light made her look even paler than she was, and against that heightened paleness her acne-reddened face and a few other faint lines of color, on which more soon, seemed particularly contrasting, something like the pink carnation pinned to a white coat in the old Marty Robbins song, or, to exaggerate the contrast, like a crab-apple tree after a snowfall, menstrual blood on a new white sheet. I never liked how strongly Wanda’s ribcage pushed at her skin, and often thought her stomach looked and felt weak and papery, but it looked beautiful that night, stretched like clay, her oval naval like a surprised mouth on a long face. Although she was naked or nude, not even partly covered by a blanket or sheet (recall how hot it was in our apartment during winter), from my doorway vantage she seemed somehow clothed. I held a blink as if to reset my vision. Once, not long ago, at a public swimming pool to which I’d escorted a friend and her toddler, my eyes were arrested by a woman’s leg clad in fishnet stockings, odd poolside attire outside of pornography, and my penis rose out of my swimsuit’s undernet. My doubletake, however, revealed that there was no woman at all, that a metal, mesh-top patio table had cast a retiform shadow on the bony legs of a prepubescent girl. Legs not unlike Wanda’s, I suppose, though shorter. She—Wanda, not the poolside girl—stayed unstirred when I walked in the bedroom, in spite of my ka-thunking cowboy boots. Looking down on her, I saw that her skin was adorned with creases, marks, impressions, and other pinkened traces of rope. My later research suggested that these were more specifically traces of decorative knots such as a five-lead by seven-bight Turk’s Head, or rather four traces of that knot, forming dimple-bracelets around each ankle and wrist. There was a fainter, complicated tortoiseshell pattern latticing her torso, vestigial I suspect of a presentational wrap derived from Japanese kinbaku or shibari bondage.
Wanda had often asked me to tie her up. But I’ve no feel for knots. Even a common square or reef knot can throw me off under certain conditions, and all of Wanda’s instruction—“Right over left, left over right, makes a knot that’s dandy and tight”—took a toll on the dom-sub histrionics and was no ally of my erection. She once suggested we seek out a volunteer “rigger,” a man or woman who would come to our apartment and do the binding, then leave us alone, but this plan was never effected.
I leaned over to get a better look at the knot traces, and still Wanda didn’t stir, even when I crawled gingerly on the bed and brought my eyes within inches of her vagina to see if I could spot drops or smears of semen. There was a small, not yet fully dried drop on her left thigh and, driven I think by some self-punishing impulse that at the time just seemed like unthinking curiosity, I licked it with a few kittenish brushstrokes. Wanda shifted but went on sleeping. I saw that our top sheet was heaped in a corner, and I positioned it to cover her partially and prettily, then went out for a riddled walk and to get a pint of ice cream.
I walked for quite a while. The plastic spoon I’d picked up at the convenience store snapped at its first dig, so I simply bit into the ice cream (I liked how my teeth marks looked under the lampposts). When I could no longer reach the ice cream by that method, I scooped it out with my mittened paw, and by the end of the carton was able to pound or squeeze-pour it directly into my mouth. I had fantasized before about watching Wanda in bed with another man, or with a group of men and women, but the others in these fantasies always had the nebulous faces of film extras or dream strangers. Now the image of Wade’s scrunched face made me flinch and cringe. I tried to concentrate solely on the ice cream, how it was both warm and cool, smooth and sticky, but these thoughts were sexual too and brought me back to Wade walking around our bed with his hard-on and rope.
Years later I lived for a while in an attic apartment into which bats often squeezed their way. Usually they would announce their presence in the middle of the night, as I lay in bed trying to fall asleep, or sometimes the sound of one flying overhead would wake me. Always there’d be a period, maybe an instant, maybe several minutes, in which I’d tell myself that it wasn’t a bat disturbing the air, that I’d heard or imagined something else, that I wouldn’t have to get up to open a screen and wait for the bat to find its way out, or squeamishly trap it under a salad bowl, then slowly slide a cookie sheet under its resisting little rubbery feet. But of course it always was a bat.
When I got back home, Wade was asleep on the sofa, and all the marks and traces had faded from Wanda’s body. She sighed when I got into bed. I brought none of this up the next morning, Friday, December 20, and neither Wade nor Wanda acted unusually.
Also that Friday, I came home from work at about six thirty to find Wade’s records gone, or largely gone—a moment later I saw that twenty to thirty of his LPs and about half as many forty-fives were leaning against my tippy stereo stand. Wanda was out that evening and I was glad to be alone, hoped my solitude would last a few hours. Armies of dust mites floated into my nostrils as I flipped through the records. I put on a warped Gary Stewart forty-five and was singing along with the fade-out (“Born to lose, dying to win!”) when Wade came in. “Y’all”—he startled me—“have a beautiful art deco post office.” He was leaving the stack of duplicate or otherwise unneeded records for me to cherish, sell, or throw away, he said. “So you’re leaving?” I said. “Tomorrow morning,” he said. “Berlin via Amsterdam. I thought maybe I could take you out to dinner.” I didn’t feel like eating. I felt as if he were gripping my insides.
As our slices were being warmed up at the pizza-and-gyro place near our apartment, Wade reminisced about Bey’s Food Host, where he’d cooked for a few years in the late sixties and early seventies. From my preschool days till we left Enswell in ’83, Bey’s was my favorite restaurant. Almost always I’d order a D-Luxe Frenchy, a cheese sandwich dipped in eggy batter, deep fried, and coated with crumby Corn Flakes. My mother and I didn’t go out to eat often, but when we did, we went to Bey’s, and later, when Wade, my mother, and I were a short-term family, we went there most Thursday nights. Bey’s was one of those restaurants at which patrons, booth patrons at least, got to order by telephone. Next to the booth phones were dwarf jukeboxes. Most of the restaurant’s customers preferred the booths to the half-dozen or so tables, cleared of novelties, though certain imaginative and unspoiled children, when the booths were full, entertained themselves at the tables by staging football games between sugar
packets, white versus pink, pink versus pale blue. Bey’s had glass walls, a white PVC floor, and orange vinyl booths. It was just explained that the booths at Bey’s were more popular than the tables, but some men, especially groups of older workingmen, would request a table so they could spend more time with the waitress. This, Wade told me as we carried our red cafeteria trays back to our table in Minneapolis, was especially true when my biological mother Martha Dickson was a Bey’s cashier-waitress. Her short stint at Bey’s probably began in July 1969, he said, and ended there as well, or in early August, but either way partly coincided with Wade’s longish stint.
Previously I’d been told that Wade had once met Martha at a party but hadn’t really known her. I’d never been told they were brief colleagues. “Does my mother know this?” I said.
“Marleen?” Wade asked.
“Well, yeah. The other one would know ’cause you say she was there,” I said.
“Okay, yeah.”
“Yeah what?”
“Yeah Marleen came to know that Martha and I worked together.”
Wade told me that Martha was a beautiful woman, as I’d heard before and as I could see from the faded instant photograph he took out of his shearling jacket and laid next to my tray. I’d never seen a picture of Martha. I’d asked my mother Marleen to see one, but she’d never taken or asked for one, which from my perspective always seemed selfish and shortsighted. I picked up and stared at the picture. Martha had lively eyes; a dimply, candid smile; two moles on her right cheek marking a shaky diagonal line like pips on a preindustrial domino; dark brown, uncommonly horizontal and uniform eyebrows, almost like Dickinsonian dashes; and long, brown hair, lighter than her eyebrows, parted slightly to the right and tied up in back, though there was a maverick, S-shaped tuft falling over her right cheek. Wade said the photo was taken in the fall of ’69, though he couldn’t say where it was taken. “Outside somewhere,” he said, as if that weren’t clear. Martha usually wore her hair up, he told me, and sometimes the maverick tuft would graze her unlipsticked lips and she’d banish it with a puff.
“What color were her eyes?” I said.
“Green.”
“Green?”
“Yup.”
“They don’t look green,” I said, bringing the photo closer to my own brown eyes.
“Well, it’s an old Polaroid.”
There was definitely something wrong with her blouse, I noticed.
“But they were brown. I remember now they were brown.”
“You two went out?” I said.
“Well, eventually,” Wade said. “We didn’t talk much at the restaurant, just said hello a few times. She walked out in the middle of what I’d guess was her ninth shift, still untying her apron as she opened the door to leave. I remember she draped the apron over a newspaper box before she got into her car. I can’t remember the headline her apron covered up. That’d be a nice touch, don’t you think?”
“What would?”
“For me to remember the hidden headline.”
“I guess.”
“It was an elegant gesture, her draping the apron over the box. She draped it delicately, made sure it was balanced. She could have dropped it on the ground, you know, something contemptuous like that. But that wasn’t her way. We all watched her through the glass. It was quiet when she left, midafternoon, just a few customers around. I’d been doing some cleanup, the prep cook was reading Road & Track, the manager was at one of the tables filling out the ledger, plaintively whistling ‘It Was a Very Good Year.’ He had a soft, warbling whistle. Martha’s exit was apparently unprovoked is what I’m saying, seemed wholly spontaneous. This pizza is truly subpar. Then a few weeks later I found her playing the gimbri under an oak tree in Ruyak Park. Up till then I’d only seen her in her uniform, so I didn’t know for sure if she was in the hippie sector or not; in the park, though, she was wearing bell-bottoms and one of her embroidered blouses, really loose in the right shoulder but nearly as tight in the left shoulder as an inflated sphygmomanometer cuff.”
“What’s that, some kind of drug thing?”
“No, no, a blood-pressure meter,” Wade said, pantomiming a nurse squeezing that big black olive. “There were a few dollars and some change in a gray Samsonite suitcase Martha had in front of her, but probably she’d put the scratch there herself, since money in tip receptacles is said to be suggestive. Do you think that’s true?”
“Do I think your story’s true?”
“No, do you think money in tip receptacles is really suggestive? I might buy a cheap guitar and do some street performing on Unter den Linden, at least till I get my first check from the station. It’d be cheaper to buy the guitar here and take it on the plane. But I doubt I’ll have time to buy one.”
“Probably not.”
“You wanna sell me your acoustic?”
“Not really.”
“I’d give you five hundred bucks for it.”
“It’s not worth that much.”
“It is to me.”
“Yeah, I don’t know.”
“Well, think about it.” Wade got up to refill our waters. There was only one other customer in the restaurant, a muscular collegian in sweats. The regular posters were on the wall: the photo of the workmen lunching on the RCA Building girder, Ruth Orkin’s shot of the American girl about to be gang-raped by Florentines. A decade later, the restaurant’s Middle Eastern (pardon the vagueness) owners would feel obligated to hang a WTC commemorative poster as well. “But anyway,” Wade said, sitting back down, “I added a dollar to Martha’s suitcase, and she smiled, still plucking the gimbri’s slack strings, drumming on its body with her thumb, swaying as she played, her embroidered blouse swaying too, where it could. All this swaying had something of the hypnotic effect the music was aiming at. I watched her awhile. Then I said, ‘What do you call that thing?’ and by dinner she was living in my apartment.”
“Just like that,” I said.
“Just like that. Would you consider a trade? I’d give you my car in exchange for your acoustic and maybe two hundred bucks.”
“I don’t really need a car.”
“An adult should have a car.”
“I don’t even know how to drive stick.”
“Well, Jesus, an hour in a parking lot will solve that. The insurance payments are nothing on this car; even for an ephebe like you it’ll be no big deal.”
“How much do you pay?”
“What? I don’t have car insurance! Look, I’m selling you the car for a lot less than it’s worth.”
“I’m confused,” I said. “Who gives who the two hundred bucks?”
“You give me the guitar and two hundred, and I give you the car. It’s a nice ride. It’s not the sport model but it’s still a good handler.”
“It seems to pull to the right.”
“That’s easy enough to neutralize. It’s been very reliable.”
“How long have you had it?”
“I’ve had it awhile.”
“But how long?”
“So Martha had grown up in North Dakota,” Wade continued after further negotiations, “first in Pennsburg, then in Enswell, where she—”
“Pennsburg? I thought it was … Wheeler.”
“Wheeler? There’s no Wheeler,” he said.
“What do you mean, no Wheeler?”
“There’s no town in North Dakota called Wheeler.”
“You know every town in North Dakota?”
“Huff, Voltaire, Napoleon, Wimbledon, Dazey, Tuttle, Hoople, Milton, Cannon Ball, Zap, Gackle, Mott—”
“Okay.”
“No, I don’t know every town in North Dakota. But she was born in Pennsburg. She lost her virginity there at fourteen, underneath some kind of graveyard fruit tree. And then she’d been Enswell High’s second prettiest cheerleader. Her parents died in the middle of her first year at Northern Illinois.”
“Yeah, I know about that.”
“Do you know about her brothers and sis
ters?”
“Not much.”
“The firstborn died in Vietnam. The sister I think was crazy. Then there’s another brother; I met him once.”
“What was he like?”
“Fat.”
“That’s all? Fat?”
“Really fat.” Wade held out his arms and puffed out his cheeks. “Not instantly likable.” He took three quick bites of his second slice, resumed talking before he’d finished chewing. “[Incomprehensible] the park, Martha told me she had no fixed address. That was the phrase she used: ‘no fixed address.’ ‘I haven’t had a fixed address in two years,’ she said. ‘But I’ve had a few broken ones.’ Our first months together were a lot of fun. She was a wild seed. I was no virgin, but up till then I’d only had meat-and-potatoes sex, sometimes hold the potatoes. But Martha was wild. She’d sit on my face and read highbrow pornography—to herself. Usually on my face she’d read poems out of a notebook, not her poems, just stuff she’d transcribed. Whenever we’d visit a friend she’d look around for books of poetry, or a magazine that had a poem or two—even the Stone published poems back then—and then she’d pick a poem at random and start copying it into her notebook. Once at a friend’s house she opened to a long poem and sat there for an hour transcribing. Browning. That’s how I turned on to him. You ever read Wanda’s paper on Browning?”
“I’ve skimmed it.”
“Better work than I did in college,” Wade said. “‘All my term papers, misspelled and overdue,’” he sang, “‘My Smith Corona had a broken W.’ As far as I know, Bolling was the first to use term paper in a C&W song.”
