Promiscuous Unbound

by Bex Brian

  Ho ho ho fucking ho ho. Marcel must have snuck in here in the middle of the night (although at what point exactly am I asleep and not pestered by ghosts and whatnot) and put up these decorations. Pretty dismal display, if you ask me. And shouldn’t this little garland of crooked, shiny letters read “Joyeux Noël” instead of “Merry Christmas”? I suppose I’ll have to be grateful, but the peeling Scotch tape and the hasty indifference, along with the ultimate meaninglessness . . . well, it’s depressing.

  I do like glitter, but real glitter—scores of lights, corporate displays of goodwill, costing thousands. The Rockefeller tree. Macy’s ground floor. Harrods, with its lighted bows and wreaths and displays of gifts, not to mention the sparklies around old St. Pat’s. Those lights can lift the spirit, make you believe in . . . the glory of electricity.

  But I’ve seen another kind of glitter, just as glorious if not more so. Glitter lit by the sun, forged by Ralph’s body: a perfect wet diamond of desire dangling from his dick. I reached out and caught it as you would a bubble. And there was, too, the river we came upon just loaded with gold dust. We took a dip away from the prying eyes of the bent prospectors shifting through the silt. In our hair, clinging to our lashes, wedded to our skin, the tenacious gold. Sun Kings we were when the cloud cover broke. I have seen my fiery, phosphorescent footprints imprinted in the African bog, one of the rare experiences shared with both my father and Ralph. In both instances my name was paced out, the only difference being that Ralph added an exclamation point. His gestures needing to be bigger because he felt less. Morning dew on jungle path spiderwebs, the early light, gratefully, igniting the strung drops so one could easily avoid the creepy feeling of phantom constraints. Nighttime skies in the middle of the ocean. Electric eels, zapping their way through swampy water. The mean glint of an animal’s eyes caught by headlights. Get all of these on the wall, Marcel, and maybe I’ll give a nod to your attempts at Christmas cheer.

  Our last Christmas as husband and wife. The weather weird and wild. A mere Channel away. Seems like an eternity, that Christmas to this, and our little rented house on the windswept shores of Cornwall. Just the two of us. I cringe now at my optimism. Another example, I suppose, of my not seeing. But can I be blamed? This time I had a helpmate in my blindness—the densest fogs I’ve ever known. Lunchtime excursions required a flashlight to lead us through the slick streets of St. Just to the Spar Shop and some tinned ham. When the fogs did lift and we set out on cliff-side walks, squalls would race toward us, forcing us to duck behind cairns and old stone walls until the sea-borne menaces had rolled over.

  We were as unsettled as the weather. Ralph, just back from his trip to the Congo, looking incongruously tanned in such a sunless place, had some sort of a stomach bug. The best cure, oddly, was to eat, and to eat lots. I was to cook, but the nose got in the way. It seemed as if all my other senses had faded into blackness. For weeks before I even went to England I seemed to be spending my days with head raised and nostrils twitching, noting that the Chinese restaurant down the block was smoking duck, or that Mrs. Gershon two floors up was having her place cleaned, or that the man who sold Christmas trees up on Broadway had received a new shipment of Canadian firs. Fun at first, until the smells became invasive, blocked everything else out. By the time we’d gotten to St. Just I was picking up everything: the tannin in wine, the earth in salt, the blood in flesh. Overwhelming. I retched and cooked. Finally, when even my evening whiskey became unbearable, I broke down.

  “I have a brain tumor. Everything smells too much. I can’t even think.”

  Ralph put down his drink and went and got the flashlight. He shined it in my ears, then my eyes, hummed a bit, and pronounced me fit.

  “Your pupils would be out of whack if you had a tumor,” he said, flicking off the flashlight. “There would be no simultaneity of pupil contraction.”

  “And?”

  “And, your eyes are in sync. You’ll have to think of something else to kill you.”

  “Why then can I smell that you just cut your fingernails? Why can I also smell the wax in your ears, and the burp you haven’t even burped yet, or the fact that it’s going to rain in twenty minutes? Why can I smell the rain-laden clouds?

  “Because you’re mad.”

  “I will be if this keeps up.”

  All the smells stopped the morning I threw up and realized I was pregnant. The whole fucking world stopped.

  “Take me to the pub,” I told Ralph.

  Steak and kidney pie for him. A whiskey for me. But I got my revenge. Before he dug in I sprang the news. The words were barely out of my mouth when he fled. In the low-bowered room of the Star Inn, six or seven worn faces stared to see what the sudden rush of wind was and then turned to me, blank and curious. I sat fighting the hot gorge of sour whiskey that was rising in my throat. I barely made it out the door.

  A pause. A punctuation. A baby.

  I puked my guts out all down the side of the St. Just’s Presbyter. Ralph roared out of the night.

  “I can’t,” he said. Very British, the “can’t” drawn out, way out.

  I held my hand up. “Wait, wait,” I wanted to tell him, “I can’t either.” But it was no use. My mystery man was gone again by the time I’d wrested myself away from the lichen-covered wall, wiped my mouth, straightened my jacket, and found my legs. The town square was so empty and the night so still, so devoid of activity, that I wondered, stumbling back down the dark lanes toward the cottage, if he had been there at all.

  Spooky how stealthily fog can roll in. A real pea souper, and one I nearly drowned in, so caught up was I in the shock that sex had betrayed me and produced something entirely unwanted. Honestly, I had never thought once that what I was doing, arse in the air, pillow between my teeth, was the same thing couples did to have a baby. And then there was the problem of whose it was. Ralph’s, possibly, but then again maybe not. What patchwork creation had my greedy egg enfolded? Maybe all of them, from time immemorial. Ralph’s legs. My nose. My first lover’s lips. My last lover’s chest. The skater’s back. Luke’s hairline. Yes, that Luke. Long-standing habit.

  Thicker, thicker still this fog got. Looked for my flashlight, but I must have dropped it. There was some light. The air glowed. A full moon perhaps. I reached out and punched a hole through the fog. My exhaled breath hung solidly in front of my face. I tried to duck around these heavy clouds of my own making, but my breath followed me. I tried bringing my face close to the hedgerows, hoping they would absorb my breath. I gulped for air, only to create more and more clouds. A seagull screeched overhead. I turned to follow the sound, and I was free. The wind at my back, my breath was taken away. The rest of the way home I walked backwards, not daring once to turn and check if anything impeded my journey.

  The cottage stank of the lamb stew. Ralph was there, sitting out in our salt-ruined patch of a back garden, smoking one of the rare cigarettes he allowed himself, the sea barely audible beyond the low wall. We didn’t speak for a few moments. I could hear his bilious stomach gurgle in protest. I wanted to retch. He popped another small piece of charcoal in his mouth. He must have eaten a shitload; I could see that his lips and tongue were stained black.

  “Who told you that turning yourself into a tar pit would help your stomach?” I asked, sitting down beside him. “Probably the same asshole who told you that meaty stews would drive your Congo bug out.”

  “Martha’s mother is a doctor; she told me to do this.”

  “Who the fuck is Martha?”

  Ralph sighed. “Channel Four, the producer. She’s the one who came up with the idea of possibly doing a show on the fish trade.”

  “I’ve never heard you mention her.”

  “Tropical fish, smuggled out of the Philippines. We intend to follow all the myriad repercussions of this illegal trade.”

  “And will this one also end up with some Asian man fucking his mistress?”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “Remember, in H
ighgate, just before you left Mary, you told me about wanting to see the final destination of elephant tusks that had been poached?”

  “I had forgotten. This story will be better anyway.”

  “Great”

  We fell silent. I knew from his blackened mouth that nothing good would come of this.

  “I wonder,” I said after a time, “if my father felt anything like we do now when he found out my mother was pregnant.”

  “How do we feel?” Ralph asked, stubbing out his cigarette.

  “Like puking. I wish you would stop chewing on that foul-smelling stuff.”

  “Martha swears by it.”

  Martha again.

  “Were you there just before?” I asked, changing my tone. “While I was being sick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Funny, I couldn’t tell if you had been. The square seemed vacant, as if nobody had ever been there.”

  “I was there, but I needed to walk.”

  “Had the fog moved in?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Just wondering. It is almost solid. Hostile. Just like where the baby is now, in a hostile environment. It can’t last. I’m poison.”

  “Plenty of poisoned people have children—just look at my mother.”

  “What’s worse? Being able to connect yourself with your mother, to know her well enough to see yourself reflected in her face, or to have never known your mother, so that you don’t know what of you is you and what is an echo of her?”

  “I don’t look like my mother.”

  “You look exactly like your mother.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Your hate isn’t enough to recast biology.”

  “If we are talking biology, neither of us brings much good to the table,” Ralph said, nodding toward my stomach. “But then again what does biology matter when you can make a life up, just like my mother, make the whole fucking thing up.”

  “You turned out alright.”

  “I managed to carve out an existence below her radar.”

  “And if you hadn’t.”

  “I shudder to think.”

  “Your hating your mother seems so luxurious. After all, what did she really do to you?”

  “She changed my reality into her reality, and her reality was unreal. Good enough?”

  “It will have to be.”

  Such storms the next day, Christmas Day, as though the fog had been the red velvet curtain on a proscenium stage, waiting to rise and show the audience the marvelous high jinks it had been concealing. Lashing rains woke us. Ralph stepped outside to make sure the car windows were closed, a bit late I thought, and came back totally soaked. Towns all along the Devon coast were being flooded. The West Country news rang out lists of road closings, weather updates, and urgent appeals to stay indoors from reporters huddled in pubs . Behind them you could spot the pints of beer they and their crew had been drinking just before airtime.

  Ralph wanted to take a walk. “It will be fun,” he said. “We’ll stand cliff-side and see if the wind is strong enough to hold us up.”

  “You’re not going to murder me, are you?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  We found rain gear and boots in one of the closets. A cliff path led right by our house. We decided to try and get to a rock promontory about a quarter of a mile on. There was a cave there we could hide in if we needed to rest. My boots were much too large. Afraid of losing my footing and murdering myself, I was soon far behind him. The wind, a life force, steady and incredibly strong, kept pushing me landward. It would have taken a hell of a lot of effort for one of us to fall to our death. By the time I reached the promontory, Ralph had already tested the theory.

  “I guess you need hurricane-strength winds,” he said.

  We turned our back to the wind and went to crouch in the little cave. “I was in a hurricane once off the coast of Japan,” I told Ralph.

  “Typhoon.”

  “We were on a small island. The thing I remember most was that while roofs were being torn off, boats hurled ashore, and cars flipped like so many Matchbox toys, everyone I saw on the streets, the brave ones who wanted to feel the storm, they all held their ground. I think humans have this secret weight. Maybe it’s because we are mostly water.”

  “The confines of which we are always trying to escape.”

  “Are we?”

  “I am.”

  I waited to have the abortion until I got back to New York. Alastair insisted on flying over to nurse me through. It wasn’t a complete waste of time for him. He did manage at the clinic to pick up a boy whose girlfriend was inside with me, the two of us shuffling through the dreary routine of sparing ourselves a life.

  I’ve been found. By of all things Hello magazine. Imagine that. Quite by accident. One of their stringers happened to be in Paris visiting his girlfriend. He stepped on a rusty nail and needed a tetanus shot. Dr. Ricard blew my cover, so to speak, and I was cornered by a real Fleet Street hack who wanted to get the scoop on the famous daughter of the famous Maurice Yellow. Lionel Charge; huge belly, stubby fingers.

  “Give me all your shit. I’ll make you smell like roses,” he said, sitting down on my white metal chair, his girth making the poor thing pop. How many times had he uttered that line, I wondered.

  “What choice have you got?”

  “None. But I’ve learned if you try and put a spin on your own story, you end up sounding like a lying cow.”

  “No, spin.” I smiled. “I was hit by a truck.”

  “Good. And have you coped with this tragedy?”

  “Solitude.”

  “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “Nobody knows I’m here.”

  A long-drawn-out whistle from Mr. Charge. A real caricature was our Lionel.

  “And the purpose of that is . . . ?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I guess I wanted time to remember what happened.”

  “Mental block, eh?”

  “Maybe. Black hole. Brain freeze. Something.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “I think I was daydreaming about my husband swimming with the fishes.”

  “Has he left you?”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Fish hunting.”

  “Marlin?”

  “No, tropical.”

  “Doesn’t seem like much of a sport.”

  “No, it doesn’t, does it. But you’ll have to take that up with him.”

  “Suppose I will.” Mr. Charge jotted a few lines down in his reporter’s notebook. “Your little accident won’t be much of a secret once my story comes out.”

  “That’s alright. I’m getting ready to be sprung. The world would have found out sooner or later.”

  “Right—then let’s get down to the nitty-gritty.” Mr. Charge leaned forward and gave a tap to my metal casing. “Looks like you were pretty banged up. Give us a list of what happened to what.”

  Shrinks should just try to be good gossips, I thought, observing the malicious pleasure that Charge seemed to get from prying open the details of my marriage. At one point Madame deBuchard popped her head through the door, and I could hardly restrain myself from telling her that she might learn a thing or two from Charge.

  “What she try to get out of you?” Charge asked as she retreated.

  “She wants to know if I thought I could re-create myself. Become a new person. I think she’s been trying to find out if I killed Ralph, because no one here can quite accept that my husband doesn’t know.”

  “The photographer is due in a bit,” Charge said, sneering toward the door. “I’ll tell his makeup girl to give you a good polish.”

  “Tough days have visited the daughter of famed television presenter and naturalist Maurice Yellow,” I said, pretending to read from his notebook. “But showing much of her father’s gumption, Vivienne Yellow has managed to keep her spirits up not only through her breakup with Ralph McCrim
mon, no stranger himself to the wilds of television, but through a long and painful recovery after being hit by a truck on the streets. . . .”

  “That sounds more like Mark Hand’s text,” Charge said. “I tend to be a little subtler and wouldn’t be caught dead using two ‘buts’ in a sentence.”

  “I wish,” I said, cutting Charge off, “I wish your makeup girl could make me look . . . I don’t know. Wise? No, not wise but full of humanity. That way if Ralph should come upon your magazine passing through some dreadful airport—and how could he not; the bloody thing is like a virus—he might feel about me everything I failed to make him feel.”

  “No can do.”

  “What?”

  “Impossible. You know what our pics are like? You are going to look like a Madame Tussaud’s waxwork with a touch of rouge. I still haven’t figured out how they manage it. Lights, I suppose.”

  “Well, I at least want my toenails painted. Bright red.”

  “Suit yourself,” Charge said, getting up from the chair. I waited for a reverse pop, but I think he broke the thing’s spirit.

  “I’m going to write this up and let you have a bit of a rest,” he said. “The photog will be here in an hour.”

  Sonia is messing my makeup. I hate to wake her, but her tears, her sweat . . . I can feel the pancake layers of foundation, all my magazine glamour, washing away.

  Not that she’d care. She thought I looked like a freak. Sniffing my blue eye shadow, she informed me that if you apply lipstick beyond the red part of your lips it means you are a schizophrenic.