by Sonia Taitz
“It’s not him. He’s taller.”
“I read somewhere that he’s shooting a movie in Costa Rica!”
“No—I think they said Upper Westchester!”
“Boston. Back Bay. He’s great with those accents.”
“You know what? It’s one of those professional look-a-likes,” says a woman, pensively chewing on the straw in her cocktail.
“Love to have one of those at my bachelorette party,” says her friend, tossing her extensions, which boast permanent banana curls. “Do you think he really looks like him?”
“Nah. This one’s too old to strip,” says another woman, licking margarita salt off her upper lip. An astute observation. Good shoulders, yes; but the hips and legs are wider than desired. Despite the hair, they give away his age.
“Too old and too damn drunk,” says a man in a seersucker blazer, jealous of the lug on the barstool. His comment is sustained by a wave of nasty male laughter.
Collum is stirred by these noises. He mutters. His large head rises, peers around briefly, then sinks down again, calling to mind a Disney animatron.
“Don’t touch me,” he growls, though no one’s touching him. “You’d drink, too,” he slurs, sitting himself up almost straight. “Been through what I been through? Be drunk like me. If I was drunk . . . which I’m not.”
“Wow! You’re so beautiful . . . Colm Eriksen? It’s really you?”
He’s always hated his movie name: “Colm”—like a coxcomb. A hair comb. One syllable, a silent “l.” His real name is Collum. Like a column of soldiers. A column of fire before them by night, a pillar of cloud in the day.
A woman bends over, breathing what feels like steam in his ear. Collum smells something juicy, like peaches, mixed with the musk of a tropical bloom. Warm female, closer than before. Flowers and overripe fruit.
He arches his head away and peers at her. The woman gets a blast of his blueberry eyes, bloodshot but still dazzling. Collum notes that hers are dark from pupil to iris, black-widowed with stiff mascara. Her breasts push into his face, proffered like a summer basket.
“Hello, me Sheila,” he says kindly. She’s wearing a V-necked leotard and pencil-thin pants. She’s worn them to be wanted and is now delighted to be seen, finally, by no less than Colm Eriksen.
“I know,” he murmurs considerately, acknowledging the awe in her face. She looks enraptured, lost, and loving it. Collum is familiar with the way such star-fan meetings go, has been ever since his image was first projected onto big screens in the dark, making it iconic. If only they knew how heartsick he is, how he, too, longs for what’s holy.
“What do you know?” she whispers, touching her own long neck. Other than the immoderate breasts, she has a dancer’s body, legs long in proportion to the torso. She should leap, he thinks; she should run far away. He has nothing for her. A cock without love is a weapon, he knows, even as he feels himself stir. Here we go again, he thinks. To the dungeon. Down to hell. He’s been there many, many times.
Collum’s words come quickly, but his voice remains soft: “I know what you all tell me: ‘you’re great, you’re handsome, you’re—sexy.’” He spits the word out.
“You don’t—I don’t understand . . .” she says. “I never met you before.”
“Oh, but you did,” he says. “You’re a fury and a succubus; we’re very well acquainted. Let’s see what happens.”
“OK,” she says, nodding without understanding, the way they all did when stung by the toxins in his heart. Aw keh. He hears a trace of an accent. Albanian? Persian? Slav? He’s sad to think that he’s had most of them.
“My name—it’s not really Sheila—but I love your crazy words. Like in that film where you were so mad and had to take revenge?”
“Be more specific,” he growls, smiling at his own harsh wit. All his movies were like that. His life was like that. “Anyway, I’m still quite mad.”
“Stop joking,” the woman says. “I’m sure you’re very nice person. Oh, God—” she interrupts herself, “I have to take this.”
She reaches into her purse and pulls out her phone, aiming it at Collum’s drunken face, his red eyes and sad mouth.
“Take that snap and I’ll break your honker.”
The woman freezes.
“Don’t be so bloody frightened, Sheila,” says Collum, laughing gently now that he’s frightened her. “When I was a lad, I got my nose broken many times.”
He continues as though on autopilot. He often tells this tale to the magazines.
“Nothing like the feel of a man’s fist, coming at your face, all knuckles and hate. ‘Now you’re not so pretty, pal,’ said a thug called Tim. ‘Oh, but you’re rugged now,’ said a lass called Briony, kissing the broken path of my airway.”
“You talk like artist. You have poems inside you?” The lunatic words and the veins in his eyes confirm that for her.
“Oh, that I do,” he responds, scanning her so intently that he seems to care. “I’m an artist and a poet and a pirate.”
She nods in sincere harmony. “But tell me, who is this Brian?”
“Not Brian. I’m not a bender, darling. Briony. Tahiti, location. Hair, makeup, shag. Dead to me now, all lost and cold, but the one that I can’t kill off.”
“You are talking zombie movies now?”
“In movies, I do pulverize them all. But this one. Crikey. She just won’t die, will she?” His face turns downward, and a little sob escapes.
“Wait. I know. Your wife of many years,” says his new friend. “I read about divorce. And after all that history,” she adds, as though it were a shame rather than a wonderful opportunity.
“Like the blossoms of Kyoto. Such delicate perfection. They all fall down to dirt, you see. But one small bloom remains.”
“You are single now?” the woman tries to clarify. Has he been in love with an Asian woman? She’s read nothing like that in the tabloids.
“One little cherry bud stubbornly remains,” he repeats sternly, “but I guess I must spell out that I am using metaphor, my darling.”
“Heh?”
“I’m talking about a GIRL, for Christ’s sake!
“Oh. What girl?”
“Yes, that’s right, there are so many girls. You, for instance. You’re a girl.”
“OK.”
Aw keh. Collum was great with dialects, a skill that had served him well in his acting career. Turkish, perhaps? He’d never been with a Turk. Might be wild. He made a tiny gesture with his hand, and the bartender sped over.
“Same again?”
“Lots more,” says Collum. “Here’s what I do with girls,” he continues, rising to his subject. “I make ’em wait while I have my smoke.”
Gazing at her breasts, Collum pulls out a cigarette. He doesn’t light it; he just rolls it in his fingers. “She waits for me . . .” he continues. “Such patience.”
“Who? The blossom? Your many-years wife?”
“Yes and yes and yes. She watches me take a long, deep drag.” He mimes with the unlit cigarette. He is good actor, she thinks, breathing like that, inhaling as though he were really getting buzzed. When he lets go, he emits a long, shuddering sigh that thrills her.
“The whole process looks as though I’m thinking, yeh? It makes her think exciting thoughts of how I’ll do her, later. In my own good time.” With great care, Collum puts the cigarette back. He lets his eyes meet her eager eyes again.
“You w—you will really ‘do’ me?”
The drink appears and he downs it quickly, his face slightly pinched.
“All night long,” he says, pushing the empty glass away, exhausted. He really must be on his way, on his journey, but now his legs don’t move. He wants to fall on his knees; he wants to cry long and hard until the waters finally dry.
“Oh, my God, you’re incredible hot!” says the woman, taking his head into her hands. Suddenly she’s kissing him. Collum notices and pushes her off.
“The lads of my youth, they weren’t
hot. Cold-blooded, they were. Don’t move to Oz as a teen, my dear. Ozzies don’t like it when you don’t talk right.”
“I am also immigrant, so I—”
“Good on you! Try being new in the never-never, back when the bush was kinkier, when sprinklers weren’t hissing and lawns didn’t cover up the dingo-bone truth. I was the abo, the wog, the wretched Yid of Yids. My fish-belly face broiled in the sun; I didn’t belong; I was mocked and jeered. Only the horses understood me, and I broke those brumbies hard as I could, ’til they couldn’t run away. But I had to run, broken or not. Had to run, run, run . . .”
This is another set piece for the press. Collum pauses and takes a breath. “I’m running now,” he admits, now honest. “And I don’t know who I am.”
“Oh, let me help you,” she says, with that tinge of an Eastern European accent. “My name is Ada,” she adds, scrabbling deep into her shoulder bag. “Here is card. I am artist like you. Pianist. Powerful fingers. Also good massage.”
Collum lets Ada tuck her card into the back pocket of his jeans. She takes her time with that, then kisses him again. Slowly, he becomes aware of the genius in her tongue. She’s not so much sexy as talented, like a dog that can do acrobatics. And not only her tongue but her teeth, too, little jolts of surprise. Hind limbs and fore. Not only the dance, but a wave of the paw.
Collum unlocks his mouth from hers. He can’t think when women play him like that. Why was life push-pull? Why no peace? Why this constant boring pain?
“Please, Sheila. I just wanna please, please God come home.” His head feels heavy, and he needs to rest it. Just briefly. To momentarily regroup.
“You are very sad man,” says Ada, sheltering him in her thin, strong arms.
Tied Up and Run Down
Jude Ewington lives in the village of Plum Grove, about an hour north of New York City. Most of the time she is not a vamp in bustier and garters, akimbo on the marital bed. She’s like that, with less and less effect, only on her birthdays or on Sam’s. She’s really just a part-time teacher, mother of two boys. Her energy is waning; life has taken a few turns downward in recent years.
A decade ago, Jude’s husband, a successful management consultant, lost his job. During the economic tailspin, every firm Sam tried to manage or consult with disappeared into the ashes of bad accountancy and global shrinkage. So the worst fate in America had occurred to this family—it had slipped and skittered downward. For instance, the family no longer found seasonal respite in the country club to which Sam had once belonged, with its clay courts and fantastic cocktail service. Nor did they take off to Europe or Wyoming for cultural experiences. They had reined all that in.
It is August, and all the summer holds for Jude is searing heat, relieved by paddling in a plastic pool, four-feet deep and seven in diameter.
Money was meaningless, said the sages. Except when you didn’t have it. If you had it, it was meaningless until you lost it. Both ways, money could make you feel slighted or bruised, as though fate itself were snubbing you, running ahead and letting a big door slam on your toes as you tried to catch up.
After the downturn, Mr. and Mrs. Ewington and their boys had moved. They moved out of the glass-and-marble house with the natural pool and koi-stocked pond and into the repurposed farmhouse with parklike garden and wide-beamed floorboards. Then they moved again, into a “charming” cottage in Plum Grove, a house so small and nondescript that the broker touted no hyphenated features. Still, the community boasted a lake, a clubhouse, and a sandy little beach where toddlers ran around in waterlogged swim diapers.
Jude’s husband is now finding the ground under his feet—metaphorically, that is. In truth, he’s in the air more and more, flying to Europe and back for his new business. He works for himself now and calls himself “a food entrepreneur.” It’s wartime, the time when the tough get going. Sam is grimly excited. He’s going to make it all back on his own ingenuity.
Jude, recovering less masterfully, is still recalibrating her life.
She had grown up comfortably in a nearby town, so living in Plum Grove as opposed to, say, Bedford, Pound Ridge, or Greenwich, is actually no great shock. In fact, at times it’s familiar and cozy to live in the little cottage. Her parents had been middle-class, upper-middle at best, not wealthy. The only sad part was that the chutes and ladders tumble had made her husband tense, almost fierce, about recouping his losses. And with that new passion, something in their bond had been displaced. These are lean times, his eyes seem to say, cutting off Jude like a dog who has gotten all the treats he (she) is going to get. No more Milk-Bone—and not even a scratch behind the ears.
Their money was gone, and that could be restored. But where has her marriage gone? Where is the love of the groom and the bride, promised and somehow unmissed? Most men, Jude realizes, are not crazy for love the way she increasingly is (just as it’s fading). “Eros” (like studying Byron in college) was a phase many of them simply endured, a toll they paid to achieve what they called adulthood. When they paired off with a mate, they were done. Most men, she realizes, are relieved to go back to “normal,” to seal the marital deal and move along. Parenthood often replaced romantic passion, but even her children, who’d worshipped her once, were teenagers now. Jude’s little nest was lightening; it swayed up on the bough without ballast.
For now, she could play the thrifty housewife. And more—she could go out into the world. While Sam struggled to restore his tail feathers, Jude had increased her hours as a teacher. Luckily, she’d majored in English at the State University of New York, at New Paltz, and now taught creative writing at the local high school. Long, languorous summers were one perk of this profession. But they left her wistful, and the sultry heat didn’t help the mood.
Jude’s pool was purchased at Toys*B-R*Joys, an emporium at the nearby mall that sold everything from cardboard, glue sticks, and glitter to bad bicycles and short-lived summer hats. The boys had fallen in love with it when they’d been much younger, and now it still served Jude well. In any case, Sam would never surrender to the indignity of an above-ground pool, which—though perfectly serviceable—told the world you couldn’t pay for excavation. But it was all right to have a little something for the kids.
And Jude took comfort in it. If you looked at it with the right attitude (one of someone who had never had an inground pool, much less one hewn out of rock with dove-gray tiles and a lovely heater), the little pool was actually no “toy” but a nicely cooling body of blue water. Once Jude’s boys got in they could frog kick a bit and feel refreshed. The plastic cover that kept the bugs out was bright and cheerful, a button on Jude’s tidy backyard. This summer, the boys seemed to have outgrown the pool.
Though they are gone, their mother still floats in its sweet little circle, curling a foam tube under her arms and kicking with her feet, slow and pensive. As the water caresses her body, she broods. Summer is almost over. Summer, when the air was hot and pools were cool, and women were, perhaps, entertaining little shivers of sheer, imagined joy. The way they used to do when their cycles first began. Even if they were now middle-aged, nearing the end of the hormonal ride, even if they were tied-up and run down. Their minds still wandered free and ageless. Jude’s did, and still does. Especially when she rides the versatile tube like a horse, a loyal and intelligent steed that could carry her anywhere in the world on a lover’s journey . . .
More and more, she finds herself thinking beyond this marriage, backward in time to the first and strongest love of her life. That boy is of course a man now, no longer young. He has married, divorced, raised kids, burned out—but Jude knew him once, before any of these diminishing events had ever happened. These days, she knows about his life the way everyone does—through the tabloids, TV, the Internet. She can follow his life more closely than she ever had, even when they lived right near each other and went to the same school. Everyone can.
But being lonely, picking up a magazine at the supermarket is dangerous. There he is, her first love. Hi
s face has changed—there are wrinkles and sags—but the hurt, unsettled eyes are still the same. They drew her then, and they draw her now, more deeply than before. This is someone, she is certain, with a soul as hungry as her own. Underneath all the accretions of their lives—and time was one of these—something absolute remained. At first, it had been enough to know this, to hold the past as a shield against the losses of the present. But soon, Jude had felt a compulsion to reach out. It is so easy to go from voyeur to participant these days.
Perhaps it was not the wisest idea in the world to have opened a Facebook account on her birthday, only to request him as her first “friend.” Not after all those years and the harsh way it had ended. But what harm could really come of it? “Colm Eriksen” had a fan page with thousands of “friends.” His profile photos were a gallery of him in endless movie getups—brooding, handsome, and heroic stills from his artificial life. The Indian, the Zulu, the monk, and the rogue. The Viking berserker, the widowed philanthropist. Jude studied these obsessively, and one day, when scouring through the list of his fans (and their own friend lists), she had noticed his original name. “Collum Whitsun” had a profile of his own, one with only about twenty “friends”—Collum’s children (all with the Eriksen surname, most still in Australia), and some of their pals. His brothers, their wives, some nephews and nieces.
Jude had then contacted Collum with a new profile that used her own “real” name—the maiden name of Pincus. A little map located her somewhere in the suburbs of New York. In her message to him, she’d written, “Another birthday, but my heart hasn’t aged.” To her delight, Collum had accepted her “friendship” immediately. The quick response felt like a huge squeeze around her, a confirming hug that warmed her, head to toe and everywhere in between.
