“Yes.” He moved from the hall to the doorway of his mother’s bedroom.
“I don’t believe you!” said M.E., flying from bed. “You must be kidding, Victor.”
“I’ve been trying to phone you for an hour.”
“The snake’s actually in her bathtub?”
“In her bathtub, in our very building. If it had happened to Paul and me, we wouldn’t have survived the experience, neither one of us. She’s in our apartment now. She won’t call the ASPCA, because she’s heard they kill things. The snake is still in her tub.”
M.E. said, “Sydney?”
“Yes,” he shrugged. “Why not?”
“I’ve lost my mind, that’s what’s happened,” said M.E., frantically pulling at things on hangers in her closets. “What’ll I throw on?”
“Too obvious, Shep.”
“What?”
“Too obvious, and we don’t have time for you to dress. Sydney and I will go there now. Sydney can just manage with that reptile all by his big brave lonesome, while Miss Gottbucks and I sip something strong downstairs. Then…”
“I show up.”
“Precisely. I am Mrs. Mary Ellen Skate, my son helped you blah blah, drinks, idle chatter, and incidentally did you hear about Celeste Skinner McRee’s participation blah blah blah blah. Oh, Shep-tee-doo, there is an all powerful!”
Shockproof’s mother said, “Sydney?”
“Yes. I said yes.”
Two
THE SNAKE IN THE BRYN MAWR GIRL’S BATHROOM
“He’s in here,” she said, leading him down a long hallway. She was taller than Shockproof, with shiny, pitch-black, breast-length hair. She wore a pair of blue bell-bottoms, a tight white turtleneck sweater, and high open-heeled sandals.
Victor was waiting out the snake’s removal on the floor below, in Paul’s and his apartment.
“The Sternfields borrowed the apartment a few days ago, while I was up in Armonk,” she said. “They were on their way to Europe with their ten-year-old son. I think Mike left this here. He always had snakes for pets.”
“So did I,” said Shockproof.
“Which I don’t mind, but…”
“They make good pets.”
“This one smells,” she said. “He’s really super-stinky.”
“He’s making himself smell,” said Shockproof.
“Huh?”
“He’s doing it on purpose.”
“How gross.”
“He does it on purpose.” Shockproof became hotly aware of the fact she had very large breasts for such a tall, thin girl.
“Like a skunk?”
“A skunk will spray you with a smell. A snake just gives off a smell when he’s afraid.”
“In here,” she said.
Shockproof had never seen such a bathroom. Gleaming wall mirrors, marble-topped cabinets with white wood-paneled doors and gold rosette knobs, enclosing twin sinks with gold faucets, twin gold candelabra wall lamps, wallpaper depicting a genteel demoiselle handing a flower to a kneeling knight, and the sliding glass doors concealing behind them the tub and shower and snake.
He was a little over three feet, hissing with outrage. His coat had a healthy gloss, and he had a coal-black shiny head. His throat and neck were milk white, while all down his body to the tip of his tail, he was painted with black and white crossbands which connected, so that the pattern resembled a chain.
“See? He’s super-stinky.”
“He’ll stop doing it soon.” Shockproof leaned down and picked him up. The snake struggled as he held him.
“He’s beautiful,” Alison Arnstein Gray said.
“Do you really like snakes?”
“I think they’re incredible.”
“I thought you’d be climbing the walls.”
“That’s Victor, not me.”
“Oh-oh. This snake is a lady.”
“Fantastic! I never thought of that.”
“A real lady.”
“Pregnant?”
He laughed. “Is that your idea of a real lady?”
“I just don’t want to be ankle-deep in snakes suddenly.”
“She’s not pregnant.” Alison moved closer to him then, and he could smell her perfume. Y. Cappy’s first lover, a writer named Liz Lear, always wore Y.
“How can you tell he’s a she?” she asked him.
Shockproof showed her, aware now of her long white glossy nails. “Her tail’s thin,” he said, “much thinner than her body. The male’s isn’t. And she’s larger than most males around the middle.”
Alison ran her hands along the snake’s body. The King was relaxing gradually.
Alison said, “When I dropped acid out in L.A. last summer, I had this huge thing about a snake curling around the universe, holding it together.”
“I never took LSD.”
“If you’re at all bent, you shouldn’t.”
“What’s bent?”
“You know. Bent. A ding-dong. Super-neurotic.”
“I still wouldn’t,” he said.
He was thinking of Esther and Monk in The Web and the Rock. He was trying to remember more about Esther, who was the fatal root of all Monk’s madness, which now could no more be plucked out of him than the fibrous roots of a crawling cancer from the red courses of the blood. At other times the green of that first April of their life together would come back again… Esther was a rich and sensual Jewish woman with pale-green toilet paper in her bathroom, who cooked Monk pot roast and steak. (“Steak, hey?—I’ll steak you!” He does so.)
“Let’s feed her,” Shockproof said. “Do you have any live rats around?”
“Naturally,” she said.
“She’ll settle for four raw eggs.”
“Yike! You know how much eggs are a dozen?”
“I’ll put her back in the tub to eat,” he said. “You do have four eggs?”
She nodded. “Hey,” she said with a sudden, turned-on smile.
“What?”
“She’s calm. You know how to handle her.”
“Sure.”
“That’s incredible. I’m super-impressed.”
As she went down the hall to the kitchen, she was Esther on her way to prepare a meal for him while he shaved.… He was Monk shouting at her “Wench! Hussy! Jew!”… She was Esther writing the letter which ended, “Save me. I love you. I am yours till death.”
If she had any discernible flaws, he had not found them yet. He supposed she had bad legs. Enormous piano legs like Judy Ewen’s lover before Corita Carr. Shockproof had once overheard Judy confide to M. E. Shepley Skate that it was a blessing women could go more places in pants, otherwise Judy wouldn’t be going anywhere but to the office and back, since her lover hated to dress because of her legs.
To dress.
That was more code.
It did not mean “to dress” in the eleventh definition of “to dress” in the Random House Dictionary: to put formal or evening clothes on; nor even in its twenty-ninth definition “to dress up”: to put on one’s best or fanciest.
To dress meant to wear a skirt or a dress as opposed to pants.
In the old days before pants were so popular, back when Cappy was with M.E., Shockproof would hear his mother and Cappy and their friends having long discussions over drinks about where they could/could not go for dinner in pants.
Cappy would always have to be talked into dressing. Dressed, Cappy was uncomfortable. She walked as though the sensible pumps she regularly purchased at Abercrombie’s were circus stilts, and lugged her handbag about like someone carrying a twelve-ounce six-pack. Dressed, Cappy always wore lipstick which was brighter and thicker than anyone else’s. When she applied it, she pursed her lips as though she were going to whistle, and manipulated the lipstick tube like a screwdriver.
“What are we going to call her?” Alison asked, appearing with a dish of raw eggs.
“What do you want to call her?” Shockproof helped her set the dish down in the tub near the King.
“I don’t know. I wish I could keep her.”
“Keep her.”
“The upkeep must be expensive.”
“No more than a dog or a cat.”
“I have a really gross allowance.”
“I could get you free frozen mice.”
“Would you?”
“If you’d really take good care of her.”
“She’d be company.”
“What about your folks?” Shockproof said.
“It’s my apartment for the summer.”
“Do you live here by yourself?”
“Yes,” she said, “that was the deal.”
“What was?”
“My family promised me if I got all A’s, I could live here by myself this summer and take a psy course at the New School.”
He said, “Is that where you go to school, the New School?”
“I’m just taking a course there this summer. I go to Bryn Mawr.”
“Oh.”
“Where do you go?”
“Cornell,” he said. “I’m at Cornell.”
“Neat.”
“What are you studying?” he said. “Psychology?”
“My parents would like me to. I’m just taking a course in it this summer. The undergraduate psy courses at Bryn Mawr are boring. I’m a phil major.”
“I might very well become a herpetologist.”
“That’s super, Sydney. What is it, exactly?”
“An authority on snakes.”
“Fantastic!”
“I might.”
Shockproof stole another look at her breasts and figured she was not wearing a bra. She would be at least 36C if she were to wear one. He had learned bra sizes when his mother had fights with Cappy, and one day accused Cappy of running off with “the first 36C who comes your way.” M.E. was a 34A and not happy about it.
“Hey,” said Alison. “Guess what?”
“Hey,” she said again. “The smell’s stopped.”
He smiled. He was remembering a scene from Rabbit Run when the hero was making love to the whore. The whore got on top of him, and he said “Hey.”
“I really want to keep her,” said Alison. “It would make up for all the snakes my mother beat to death with hoes up in our garden in Armonk.”
“Nobody ever just chases one away,” Shockproof said.
“And my grandmother! You ought to see my grandmother kill a snake. She really hacks it up. She says if you don’t, they split in half and grow into two snakes then. My grandmother’s super-stupid!”
“Super-stupid,” Shockproof agreed.
“I don’t think I can afford a snake.”
“Anyone can afford a snake.”
“I’ll need equipment. What about the equipment? I don’t think I can afford a lot of equipment.”
“I’ll help you,” Shockproof said. “I’ll make a cage for it, if you really take good care of it.”
“Would you? Really?”
“Sure.”
She laughed. Definitely did not have on a bra. Breasts shook while she laughed and Shockproof felt something sink in his stomach.
“I’m going to keep her!” Alison announced. “This is incredible! I’ll have my own snake.”
Shockproof said suspiciously, “Your mother and grandmother won’t come here to visit, will they?”
“They promised. It’s my place. My grandmother’s in L.A., anyway. She lives in L.A.”
“Do your mother and father live here in the winter?”
“Part of it.”
“Nice,” he said, imagining himself all summer long walking over from Nineteenth Street carrying things with him: one night that chilled Lancers his mother liked, and the hard yellow cheese M.E. shopped for on Bleecker Street; another night Poison-Free Heat-N-Eat Delicacies from the Bio-Organic Kitchen—the poems of Leonard Cohen (were they too bent?), the I Ching, some Zap Comix, an Ike and Tina Turner album, Ecotactics: The Sierra Club Handbook for Environment Activists—walking some nights in pouring rain so she would have to hang his coat up (beside his pajamas) in the bathroom to dry, and he would kiss her with his head still soaked, her warm fingers with their glossy white nails tangled in his wet hair. “Very nice,” he said.
“You haven’t even seen it,” she said.
“What?”
“This place.”
“I can tell.”
“It is pretty incredible,” she said. “Sydney—hey—I’m super-excited. I just hope a snake isn’t expensive. I hope I can afford her.”
“You can.”
“You don’t know the size of my allowance.”
“I better take it for the night,” he said. “I’ll take it to ZZL, check on its health, let it rest until we fix up a place for it.”
“What’s ZZL?”
He told her.
“Hey,” she said, “do you want to know something super-suspicious. I just noticed it. Now that you know she’s a she, you’ve been calling her ‘it.’ I protest, Sydney. That’s unfair to women.”
Cappy was always protesting ads that were unfair to women. Cappy had marched against McSorley’s Ale House one spring, protesting their policy of admitting men only.
“Last Halloween at Bryn Mawr we burned all these copies of Playboy in this big bonfire,” Alison said. “Then we all went to the Vomit and had hamburgers and vowed we’d never do housework.”
Then she said, “What am I going to name you, Snake?”
He noticed a copy of Rod McKuen’s Listen to the Warm on the bathroom scale. He had a sudden picture of her immersed in a bubble bath reading poems about ephemeral love, and then she became Faye Osborn from The Seven Minutes, telling Mike, “Forget about books and make believe, and let’s love each other.”… He thrust harder and faster into her, as if trying to weld them into one, and her pelvis lifted and fell with him, and rotated with him, and no more.
“You could call her Aesculapius,” he said.
“Aesculapius was a male serpent,” she said.
And then he heard no more because he was telling her inside how it was, he was bursting inside her, shuddering, bursting, letting go and suffocating in her nakedness.
“Concentrate, Sydney,” she said.
“I am.”
“I want her to have a nice name. Everyone always has it in for snakes,” she said. “My grandmother says snakes milk cows if farmers don’t keep them out of barns. People are super-stupid about snakes. I identify with snakes for that reason.”
“For what reason?” he said.
“Because they get picked on for nothing. They exist; they get picked on. That sums up snakes.”
“Call her paranoid” he said.
“Oh, very funny.”
“Well, what are you going to call her?”
“She has to have just the right name.”
“How about M. E. Shepley Skate?” said a familiar voice.
She was standing at the other end of the hallway, with the YSL scarf tied under her hair, a Gauloise between her fingers. She was in one of her Lilly’s, and a pair of Swedish clogs at the end of long, brown, bare legs.
“I knocked but you didn’t hear me,” she said. “I’m Sydney’s mother.”
She was carrying the white Mark Cross key case, and he tried to fathom why she would drive the Mercedes just around the corner.
Three
REJECTION DIARRHEA
The errand Shockproof’s mother had invented to get rid of him was for Shockproof to help Ellie Davies move some suitcases to the Algonquin, then bring her back to Nineteenth Street for dinner.
It was the first time M. E. Shepley Skate had ever allowed him to drive the Mercedes, and like any first Shockproof could remember, it was riddled with disappointment.
The first time Shockproof had ever had a girl was the summer he was fourteen, when his mother had the cottage with Corita Carr at Fire Island Pines. The girl was Loretta Willensky, whose father was the famous hairdresser, Mr. Boris. She and Shockproof had been thrown together a lot that summ
er. They were the only teenagers on that part of the island. When they finally got around to sex, Loretta Willensky kept up a running commentary dealing with her incapacity to feel sensation in the erogenous zones, while Shockproof pumped away on her immobile body like a necrophile.
Shockproof had not wanted to leave Alison Gray’s, and for a moment after his mother’s arrival while she took charge in M. E. Shepley’s inimitable style, Shockproof had veered away from any environment where women were allowed, checked Cornell off and enlisted in the Air Force Academy, reveling in the familiar camaraderie of men with men, enveloped in foot-lockers, shoe trees, jockstraps, styptic pencils, military brushes, Vitalis, tobacco pouches, until he could smell a heady stew of Mennen’s, Jade East, Brut, English Leather, and then hear the high and zealous sound of a full male chorus caroling at Christmas.
Next he was out on the street with the snake, the keys to the Mercedes in one pocket, a package of Marlboros in the other. The latter had been pressed into his hand by Alison, while Shockproof’s mother was out in the hall summoning Victor from his apartment.
“I don’t smoke,” Shockproof had told Alison.
“Those are Mary Jane Marlboros. They’re packed with pot.”
Shockproof rolled his eyes back and said “Hey, hey” to show his appreciation, though he had never really felt any more sensation than Loretta Willensky in her erogenous zones, the first and only time he had smoked marijuana. That had been another flaw-filled first.
Shockproof had deposited the King at ZZL and done Ellie’s errand, hardly conscious of the impression he was making behind the wheel of the Mercedes. He was veering between anger at M. E. Shepley Skate, and someone named Raoul who had called Alison on the phone.
“Oh, Raoul!” she had exclaimed at one point, in a pretense at outrage but grinning evilly, and Shockproof had hated him for having such a cool name and the privilege to say whatever intimate things he had said.
When Shockproof returned with Ellie, there was a message on the answering service that Estelle Kelly was home and expecting him any time after eight.
Shockproof Sydney Skate Page 2
